


Code Switching

by Therrae (Dasha_mte)



Series: Xenoethnography [3]
Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Aliens, Anthropology, Culture, Mecha, Xeno, Xenolinguistics, multi-cannon-mashup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-04-21 09:30:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 67,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14282001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dasha_mte/pseuds/Therrae
Summary: The infirmary was a whirlwind of action. Arcee, Wheeljack, and the trainees were getting Ratchet’s space back into shape before he returned to duty.  Carly had found a long, fluffy dust mop and was making enthusiastic use of it. Arcee and Epps were wiping down tables. June and Dr. Nomura were sorting cables by size and port compatibility. Wheeljack was doing something in cabinets. When Kim came in, he turned and pointed to her. “Good. I need a human.”





	1. Ellipsis

**Author's Note:**

> Not mine; no claim of ownership, no profit. 
> 
> Thanks as always to Martha. Her forbearance and support and diligent betaing has made this possible.

**Chapter 1**

She woke up when they turned onto the faux dirt road leading to the Bot entrance to NEST. Rubbing her face, she looked around. It was dark, so…late.  “Everything okay?” she asked.

Optimus had gotten his radio functional somewhere south of Provo Utah, and after that he’d been busy receiving reports and holding conference calls with generals and national security people.  Kim, utterly exhausted and sore from the hours of tension, had fallen asleep.

“The situation is not currently in crisis.”

 _Ooooh_. “That bad, huh?”

“There is rather too much flux for me to estimate the degree of ‘badness.’”

The entered the curving tunnel and Kim’s heart leapt. _Home_. Impulsively, she squeezed the hula dancer’s base.

The main assembly area was chaos. The new arrivals, who had traveled home alted as FBI sedans, transformed back to odd-looking mecha and were being corralled by Bulkhead and led back toward the ‘Bot commissary. The trucks bearing the unconscious Cosmos and the remains of the Decepticon attackers were being managed by Strongarm and Drift.

Optimus didn’t pause in the assembly area but swung directly to the right and followed the slight curve into the infirmary. He pulled up beside a repair berth that had been lowered almost all the way to the floor. Ratchet.

“Kim, you must get out now.  Stand well away from me when I am in root form. If the patch on my gyros fails, I will fall.”

“Okay,” Kim whispered. “Good luck.”

Stiffly, clumsily, Kim climbed out of the cab. Optimus waited until she had joined June, who was waiting with Arcee halfway across the infirmary, before transforming and dropping to one knee beside the low bed.

Cybertronix didn’t vary much for individual vocal quality, and the sounds weren’t familiar enough to locate distance or location. The words warbled and crooned, rising and falling like splashes of water, but Kim could not have said which mech was speaking at any point.

Well. The audible part of the conversation would only be part of it anyway. Optimus had repaired some of his radio nodes: they would also be talking over the radio and glyphing one another.

“So, busy couple of days,” June whispered.

Kim blinked. How long had they actually been gone? Was it…Friday night? Early Saturday morning? So much for the Independence Day celebration. “Damn.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Yeah, the trucks and FBI escort kept having to stop at service stations.”

“I can’t imagine how awful it must have been,” June said.

Kim looked at Ratchet. He was hooked to external machines. There was a huge patch of dead nanites on his arm. “Things must have been just as bad here. Ratchet—”

June sagged slightly and whispered, “He’s lost almost a kilogram of protomatter. Unspecialized protomatter, so it isn’t like rebuilding a part, but…he _really_ needs to have it cut out. His repair systems _can_ reclaim and absorb the raw materials, but that’s slower and painful and it’s making him sick—although he wouldn’t put it like that.”

Kim closed her eyes. “He won’t let humans operate on his protomatter.” It wasn’t a question.

“No. He’s too scared. He barely let us work on damaged armor.” She took a deep breath. “They’re saying one of the ship passengers has a reputation as having been a really talented engineer before the war.  He would have the technical skills….although maybe not the mods anymore.”

Kim frowned. “Which one?”

“Motion that Lifts Aside the Barrier to Success,” Arcee put in.

Kim frowned. Had she met everyone? Wasn’t there a name kind of like that? Kim sighed. “Hey? What is the direct translation of your name?”

“Merciless Death to Decepticons. Except it is euphemism for Decepticons that doesn’t translate.”

“Um, really?” Kim asked. Surely this was Autobot humor. “How, uh, does Merciless Death come out as Arcee?”

“Optimus wouldn’t let me. He said it gave the wrong impression. The glyphs—what happened to your phone? Did you run out of power?”

Kim sighed. “It was destroyed. By the electromagnetic pulse or whatever when the bridge collapsed.”

“Ouch. Anyway, the glyphs for that look a little like the English letters R and C.”

Chromia entered the infirmary from the direction of the bridge tunnel. “Enough, my Prime,” she said with a show of meek deference. “You must be seen to.”

He looked up at her unhappily, but Ratchet waved him away. He gave the beep that sometimes accompanied his dismissal of the trainees.  Until this moment, Kim had assumed the beep was an expression of irritation or personal dislike.

With a hand under his arm, Chromia helped Optimus to his feet. “My motor capacity is not diminished, Honorable Advisor.”

A weapons hatch on Chromia’s left hip briefly opened and then snapped shut.  June frowned. “She’s sure pissed at him,” she whispered.

Arcee nudged her sharply. “Hush.” 

Instead of stepping toward the empty repair berth, Optimus turned toward the corner. “I will see Fixit as well before we begin my repairs.”

“He is sedated,” Chromia said, but she did not attempt to interfere with his movement.

Kim had not noticed the active pallet—squashed into a rectangle only slightly broader than a twin bed and chin-high to a human—in the corner. Optimus, with a show of graciousness, allowed Chromia to spot him as he crouched beside it. “Ms. Madsen?” he said softly.

Maggie? From her position, Kim could not see her. But she could hear the answer. “They’re saying—Sir, they’re saying he might be fixable?”

“Yes, Ms. Madsen. It will take a little time, but Fixit will be repaired. If he wishes, he can be upgraded.”

“Can he—can we wake him up? I’m sure he—It was only because he thought he couldn’t be repaired that he was so upset. It would be all right now--?” Maggie—Maggie at the bridge, cool and sharp and confident, Maggie who did impossible math in an alien language and never batted an eye—was begging. Kim felt slightly ill.

“Perhaps so,” Optimus conceded gently. “But the damage has compromised his cognition. For him to function effectively, he will need have his processing priorities re-allocated and his drives re-partitioned. It is agreed that he will receive such alterations most…easily from me. But right now, I am too damaged myself to perform such maintenance.”

Whatever Maggie answered, Kim didn’t hear it. Optimus said, “He is experiencing no pain. His systems are running continuous repair cycles. He is receiving and properly processing energon.  There is no cause to fear for his wellbeing or grieve for his suffering.”

Whatever Maggie answered, Kim didn’t hear.

Chromia shifted slightly. “Beloved Comrade,” she said pointedly. Optimus allowed himself to be pulled to his feet and guided to the waiting repair berth.

“Whoops,” June whispered. “I guess that’s me.” She dug a pair of rubber gloves from her pocket and put them on.

“Piece of cake,” Arcee said. “We’ve rehearsed this so much you could do it in your sleep.”

“Kim, you can’t come,” June said, producing a paper mask. “He’s going to open his inner seals. His repair systems _can_ clear specks of dander or condensed moisture, but—”

“No, it’s fine.  I don’t do repairs. I’ll go up to the shelf.”

It should not have been a surprise when Chromia lifted away part of Optimus’ helm: she _knew_ that most cognition happened in the torso and most sensory processing happened in the head. But still, seeing part of his _head_ slide away, seeing circuits and clusters of connectors behind his face—

The alienness of it was disorienting. For a moment she couldn’t think, couldn’t _breathe_ —

A machine. A computer.

Kim screwed her eyes shut. _Person. He is a person. They are all people._        

She had seen the inside of torsos. Why would the inside of a head be such a horrible shock?

_Friend, he’s my friend. He’s made of circuits. I’m made of meat. It doesn’t matter what we’re made of._

He was her friend and he was letting a half-trained organic perform surgery on him—

Kim forced open her eyes and made herself watch.  June was using tweezers to pluck invisibly small _somethings_ from Optimus’ circuitry and replace them with invisibly small _somethings_ from a box Arcee’s blue unit was holding. Arcee’s Pink unit was holding a tablet through which Ratchet appeared to be watching and (although Kim was not close enough to hear much of it) giving brusque advice.

 _This will fix him. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. This will_ fix _him._ Optimus had lost nearly half his sensor inputs in the energy wave that had destroyed Kim’s phone. He had been blind and deaf in information channels Kim didn’t even have.  And it had _hurt_. And the repairs he had made had been rushed and tenuous, and under pressure _they_ had failed. _We got home. He’s getting help. It doesn’t matter what it looks like from my perspective, because this will help him_.

Hell of a time to be ethnocentric. Or bio-centric. _And if this is happening to me, after being here more than a month, how will other humans react?_

***

The whole procedure could not have taken ten minutes.  As soon as they were done, Optimus placed himself in a repair cycle. Still and dark on the medical berth, he looked…turned off. _Not dead_ , Kim reminded herself.  _When they die the chromeonanites fail. He’s still gloriously colored. He’s fine. He’s sleeping_.

She climbed down to join June. “How’d it go?”

“I used to wonder what it was like to be a surgeon,” she answered, stripping off the gloves. “Ugh.” She shuddered. “To answer your question, though: well. It went well. And he’s less sassy with me than with Ratchet. That’s something.” She sighed. “He’s going to be fine.”

“What was that disagreement at the end?”

“He wanted to set the shutdown for ten hours. But Keller won’t be here for sixteen, so Chromia guilted him into setting the repair program for that.”

Kim frowned.  Ironhide had said it was a fifty-hour repair. “Is that enough?”

“No. Well. It might be enough for stabilizers and full radio spectrum. Listen, he won’t be awake until late tomorrow afternoon. There is nothing you can do now.  I’m still under the nursing rules—I’m mandated twelve hours off now, so I’m going home to go check on my son and get some sleep.”

Kim, instead of heading right to the Cold War hallway, went over to the short, plump, yellowish pillar that was Fixit’s active pallet. “Maggie?” she called softly.

“You don’t have to whisper,” she answered dully. “You won’t wake them. Human’s just hanging out aren’t a threat priority. And you _couldn’t_ wake Fixit.”

“I’m so sorry. How are you both doing?”

Maggie stepped out of the shadow. She was in jeans and sneakers, her hair half down and her make-up gone. “Prime was right,” she said shakily. “He’s better off unconscious. It was horrible when he was awake. I just….”

“He overheated?” Kim asked tentatively.

“The bridge feedback—we couldn’t keep up with the subspace fluctuations through the interface. He jacked in and turned off his safeties. He overheated so badly he off-lined. He’s lost ….” She topped and turned back to the pallet.

“I’m sorry.”

“They cry. Did you know that, Kim? Mecha cry.”

“They—what?” Cry? How could they? Crying was so organic, so _biological_. And it made no sense from a design standpoint. Why would they build _that_ into themselves? “How could they--?”

“It’s a horrible sound.  A wailing, a keening….It’s jarring, like twisting wet wool, but…it’s so full of grief….”

“They cry….” Kim whispered. She had taken it for granted, she realized, that it was something she would never have to watch these informants do.  What could it possibly mean, that they cried? Had they learned it from humans? In just four years? Was it part of the language pack? But they turned off the tone and expression features when the emotions were upsetting. Could it be a glitch—running a human body language pack by accident? Could he really be crying?

Kim gaped. How could it be real?

Maggie, oblivious to Kim’s confusion, produced a ragged tissue and blew her nose. “When he woke up and found out he couldn’t work at the bridge anymore--” she cleared her throat. “He just fell apart.”

Kim stepped closer, put a hand on her shoulder. “He really likes it? Working at the gate?”

“No, he--we _need_ him! Kim, he isn’t armed. He doesn’t have the power systems to sport weapons.  He’s too small to pass as an earth vehicle. But if he can’t work the bridge station, someone else will have to.  Someone who _could_ be fighting or searching for energon, that’s why he—Oh. You probably don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“When he found out…that so much processing power was gone…he did the calculations on how much –how much he’d have to speed up the processors that were left to keep—and then he started to _do_ it, but he was hooked to a monitor and Arcee told him to stop. He couldn’t—there was no chance he could manage the heat from that. But he did it anyway. And Ratchet was in such bad shape by that point, and nobody knew what to do. That’s when they called me.  I begged him to stop, but—Chromia had to come in and put an override on his internal systems.”

Kim tried to picture that. She tried to picture having control over how her brain worked and then being locked out of it.

“That’s when he started crying,” Carly whispered. “He refused energon. There’s other damage too, from the heat.  He needs to heal but…. I couldn’t get through to him at all. That’s why he’s sedated, he’s on an energon drip….”

“Oh. Fuck.”

“He’s not—he’s not thinking clearly, obviously.  It’s—It’s a lot of trauma. Prime is probably right; his operating systems have to be absolutely rooted right now.”

This was so awful. Kim looked at Fixit laid out on the pallat.  Most of his form was above eye level—the pallet’s small surface area meant it couldn’t drop any lower. “Listen, Maggie. You can’t do anything for him right now.  I’ve got…well, canned stew in my room. And beer. Not good beer, and not a lot of it but…anyway, you should come and eat something.”

She shook her head. “I have to be on duty at seven. I should go home and try to get some sleep….”

“Okay. You can have my bed.  I slept half the way home from Wyoming. I should write down what I can before I forget.” _Hell. Fieldnotes._ “And maybe take a shower.”

***

The shower in the Cold War barracks was so relaxing that Kim almost regretted giving her bed away.  So…It was a good thing she had. She couldn’t sleep on these fieldnotes. She was already forgetting, and so much had happened.  

She dressed in the sad, grey locker room and went downstairs to the office corridor.  It occurred to her then that she might want to check on Max.  Everyone had been busy for a couple of days.  She hadn’t seen Slipstream around.

Max was _meow_ ing, but there was food in his bowl and water in his little fountain. She noticed absently that at some point more cat toys had arrived.

She scooped Max up and held her against her body.  Just a few minutes, she told herself.  Not that she could count minutes—she had no phone to keep track of time.  Where was she even going to get a new phone? And could anyone but Ratchet modify it for ‘Bot channels? And even if she had a phone and it was modified, the glyph app was Bumblebee’s pet project, and last time she’d heard, Bee was stuck on another continent waiting for a cargo flight home.   Maybe Jazz had a copy?

Max _meow_ ed again, and Kim opened her mouth to speak to her, but the words that came to mind were, _Oh, Max, it’s all so awful_ , and no, she once she started that she wouldn’t stop.

She rubbed Max’s ears, kissed her on the top of her head, and resolutely went out to the mezzanine. There was so much to write down, now, while she remembered. The most precious parts were her interactions with the Mecha who had just landed. You didn’t get a second chance at a first contact. Right then, with the English lexicons barely open and the body language modules still zipped, their thought processes and statements were nearly ‘pure’ Cybertronian. It was the closest she would get to their native communications.

There might be other new Cybertronians to speak to someday later. Or there might not.

She settled on the battered mezzanine couch and wrote all she could remember of her impressions. Springer (surely, he couldn’t have been named for his color, though it was the bright green of new plants) had moved with firm, large steps; no hesitation, no long pauses for scans. Blur had been quick, obviously. And even through the inflectionless delivery of a mech with no English paralanguage subroutines running, excitable. And he had repeated words sometimes, just piled them on top of one another. Kim seemed to remember that Earth AIs (as primitive as they were, so there may be no commonality here) did that when communicating with each other.

The conversation with Tenacious Pursuit of Useful Information she recorded in as much detail as she remembered.  What had he said, word for word?  How had he told them to begin the field repair?

What did she remember of Singer of the Cosmos? Nothing, really.  Carly and Epps had been inside him. She would have to ask….

**Chapter 2**

She woke confused: where was the deep _thrummm_ of Optimus’ torque engines? Had they _stopped_? Why would—?

She was on the couch on the balcony at home. They’d made it home last night. Oh.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes—and froze in surprise.  There was a thing perched on the edge of the balcony, twined over and around the banister. It was rainbow-colored. And it had optics, which were focused tightly on her. Kim cleared her throat. “Hello.”

“You are not Carly,” the rainbow mech stated.

“No. I’m Kim.”

“Good day, Kim. I am pleased to encounter you again.”

There was some vocal inflection, but not a lot, and there was no regional accent. Without taking her eyes off multicolored Autobot, Kim reached for her notebook and wrote that down. “I think you must be Tenacious Pursuit of Useful Information,” she said.

The head nodded once, a mechanical, economical motion. “After consulting with the lexicon, I have shortened it to Hound.”

“Um, Hound has a really broad, I mean, what specifically….” She trailed off, unwilling to say out loud, _you don’t mean to say we are to call you_ dog _, surely_?  

“Yes, English is very difficult. ’Hound’ in the sense of partner-symbiote creature that seeks out that which is missing or hiding. The term is also used to mean ‘to pursue relentlessly.’”

“Oh.” _Dog, then. Okay_. “Welcome to Earth, Hound. You’re very pretty.”

“Thank you for the compliment.” He thrust out an arm, which promptly turned a gleaming black. “What color is this?”

“Black,” Kim answered at once.

The arm dulled to a blunt matt. “Now?”

“Still black.”

The next four changes were all black.   On the last one, though, Kim added, “Well. Sort of _greenish_ -black.”

They did green after that. It was mesmerizing in a way, to be on the other side of a Munsell test. Green faded into yellow, and then they went back and did it again for green fading into blue. About three minutes into blue, Kim threw a linguistic monkey-wrench into it and said, “It depends on what language I’m thinking. In English that is blue. Or you could specify royal blue, because we subdivide. In Russian, though, different blues aren’t both blue. That’s _ciniy_.”

There was a pause.

“You imprecisely divide light frequencies into colors, but different culture groups recognize different categories?”

“Yep.  You ready to run away from us yet?”

The mech seemed to deflate.  Parts that had been projecting up now had a decided downward slump. “I was told your people were very like us.”

“In a lot of ways, we are. But not color.  For one thing, our optics aren’t as sensitive as yours. And for another, we have no way to calibrate them.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Kim said.  “Even we can’t pretend our relationship to color makes logical sense.”

Hound reached one arm out, the tips of the claw at the end transforming to reveal pressure pads and chemosensors. That was all the warning Kim had before he ruffled her hair with the tip of a digit the size of a large man’s fist.

It was a shock, how quickly he moved.

It was a shock, after weeks of mecha touching only for transportation, to experience tactile curiosity.

It was a shock, years after deciding to specialize in post-industrial societies, to be pawed by an informant who had never seen a person like her.

Kim managed not to flinch. She managed to breathe.

Hound gently prodded her scalp. “What is this fluff? It appears not to be clothing. Am I using that word properly, clothing? Is this some kind of sensor array?”

“No. I mean, yes, it grows out of my body. It isn’t clothing.  But it isn’t a sensor. It’s just hair.”

“For warmth? It does not seem particularly efficient.”

“Um. And sun protection.” Kim sighed. “Really…It might be we selected for it because we liked the way it looked.”

“It must take substantial energy to grow…. Is vanity a priority for humans?”

“Um.” Kim said.

 “Will contact active sonar harm you? This information is not in the specifications for your species.”

“Um…I’m not sure….”

“I have asked Jazz. Hmmm.” The _hmmm_ was articulated with thoughtful seriousness.

Kim batted experimentally at the very large servo tapping her stomach. “It’s considered polite to _ask_ first.”

The hand withdrew, the face stretched a little closer. “Ask what?”

“Permission for touching.  Have you got internet? Search terms: body language, kinesics, personal space.”

“Hm—Oh.” There was a long pause and then he _tickety-beeped_. “I had no _idea_!” There was another long pause.

Kim said, “If you have the internet, can you look for the public duty roster? Do I have any meetings?”

“Yes, you have missed two meetings with an individual designated Special Agent William Fowler.”

“Oh, hell.”

“The next one is scheduled for eleven minutes from now.”

“Ooops.” Kim shoved her notebook into her (now filthy) canvas field bag. “Gotta run.”

“May I come with you?” Hound asked earnestly.

“I’m not sure you’ll fit. Probably.  Do you have to be somewhere else?”

“I am currently running background applications in preparation for a three-stage transcan.  This can be completed anywhere.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

His legs were too long and jointed in too many places. His face was two huge eyes and a lot of sensor arrays not at all arranged in a way reminiscent of a nose or mouth or ears or a mohawk.  Well. This would be interesting.

***

They didn’t make it to Bill’s office. Going the other way, he ran into them when they exited the tunnel. “Where the hell have you been?” he groused.

Kim made a face. “Completely out of touch because my phone was destroyed.”

“Completely out of…. Well get another phone!”

“The last phone was modified by Ratchet. I guess I could order a phone. If commerce is still working. Is—is everything out there in the world still….?”

Bill sighed. “More or less. If the airwaves stay clear, we can start to bring back air traffic tomorrow. The stock market is expected to open as usual on Monday. The popular theory at the moment is that the Earth’s magnetic field sort of hiccupped.  It’s been acting weird lately—they tell us its overdue for a flip and might invert or something in the next thousand years.”

“Is that what happened?” Kim asked.

“Nope.”

“The electromagnetic disturbance was not a natural event,” Hound said.

Bill sighed again. “Who’s your friend with the failed camouflage?”                     

“This is Hound. Hound, this is Agent Fowler with the FBI.”

“Failed camouflage. That is a humorous proposition. You are very funny.” Hound bent his legs in all the wrong places and crouched down. He reminded Kim of a huge rainforest frog. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation seeks information on criminal activities. Are criminal activities ongoing in this location? Or have Decepticons been categorized as criminals?”

Bill turned to Kim and raised on eyebrow. Kim shrugged. “He’s serious.”

“The FBI is involved so that when some county sheriff starts reporting cars doing things cars don’t normally do, we can say, ‘Nope. Already looking into that. No big deal. Nothing to see here.’ Just think of us as a layer of making-life-easier.”

“It was Bill who arranged for the trucks,” Kim said.

Fowler fixed Kim with a dark look. “I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a report.”

“What, _now_? Washington State was fine. Nothing unusual—no Decepticons, no energon.  When we were getting ready to bridge home it exploded, destroyed my phone and knocked out Prime’s radio. We got a map and started to drive back to Nevada. We rendezvoused with Ironhide and Carly, and then a space ship crashed in Wyoming. Speaking of, I’m beginning to think you left out some things when you explained the job, Bill. Spaceship crash investigation wasn’t in the interview.”

“Hey! You can’t expect me to detail every single fringe benefit, now can you?”

Kim made a grumpy noise which, echoing in her own ears, reminded her embarrassingly of Ratchet.  “Anyway, Carly and Epps were fantastic.  They were—damn, Bill.  If Ratchet tries to fire these, I’ll—“ Kim took a deep breath. “No. Just no.”

Hound nodded, a broad movement that seemed to involve several extra neck joints. “The human repair team was unexpectedly adept. I had only estimated my chances of survival at seventeen percent.”

“How are the repairs holding?” Kim asked.

“Quite well, thank you. I am scheduled for a physical reformat in four days. The scars from the injury will be purged then.”

Bill brightened. “Oh, hey.  Have you picked an alt mode yet?”

Kim pulled out her notebook and took frantic notes: the process for picking a first Earth alt was a precious find, but she still didn’t know enough about cars to follow the priorities.

*******

In her hurry, she hadn’t had a chance to really look at the bridge on the way to Human country. On the way back, she stopped and stared.  The consoles had been disassembled. Part of the floor under the alcove had been taken up and all sorts of impossible technology had been taken out and scattered in piles. Drift had half-climbed into the ceiling and a silver-and-red mech Kim didn’t know seemed to be coiling crystalline thread on a spindle he held on his hand.

Pierre and Maggie were unpacking and mounting a stack of human -made computer monitors. “How are you doing,” Kim asked them softly.

“Could be worse,” Maggie said shortly.

Pierre shrugged. “The output gate that is keeping Fixit from trying to repair his damaged processors is holding.  It is something.”

“I don’t understand,” Kim said. “Isn’t repairs a good thing?”

Pierre shook his head. “His nanites are not able to repair processors. They are very complex, even by mech standards. If he tried….”

“If he tried, he would waste energon,” Maggie said bitterly.

Pierre laid a hand on her arm. “If he tried, he might deplete other systems trying to scavenge raw materials. And other parts were spoiled by the heat. If his repair systems could not be diverted, the damaged parts would have to be removed. Fixit is pretty small. The only one with the mods to do that besides Ratchet is him,” he nodded toward the silver and red mech.

“Who is he?” Kim asked.   He was, she estimated, larger than Jazz, but smaller then Ironhide or Bulkhead.

Pierre made a small face.

“It depends on who you ask,” Maggie answered. “’Either Violent Removal of Difficult Obstacles’ or ‘Motion that Lifts Aside the Barrier to Success.’ And he’s either an infamous engineer or a commando.”

“Infamous…Engineer?”

She shrugged. “Jazz tried to explain it. I wasn’t listening.”

Pierre glanced over at the working bots and frowned.  Kim made a mental note to ask him about it later.

The two mecha weren’t talking. Kim wondered if they were glyphing.

***

She needed a phone.

She could go to town and get a phone.  She could get two—one to put on a human phone carrier and use as a regular phone and the other just for ‘Bots.

She could go to town and get a phone. In her car. Which might not start, it had been in storage so long.

And asking for a ride—Now? When everyone was so busy? Bumblebee, one of her usual rides, was in South America somewhere. Bulkhead? She hadn’t seen him. He might do it.

She slowed passing the infirmary.  Fixit’s pallet had risen to Arcee’s waist level and she was fussing with something. Arcee wasn’t fond of being shifted to medical work. 

Ratchet was still and inscrutable on his repair booth, probably shut down.

Optimus—

That berth was empty. What the hell? Was it late afternoon already? Kim wasn’t hungry enough to have missed lunch by a few hours. 

_I need a watch. One of those watches with hands and goddamn gears. A watch that you wind._

She had meant to be there when the repair cycle ended.  Possibly that was silly. But she had wanted to be there.

Walking a little more quickly—the computer in her room would show the time and she was getting kind of hungry—she turned the corner into the vast vault of the assembly room, and nearly tripped over her own feet. It was full of mecha. Jazz, Chromia, Windblade, Ironhide—There was Optimus standing by the balcony.  And Slipstream (she hadn’t seen him since she got back) standing next to the scowling Jetstorm. And Strongarm, pacing.

None of them were talking, although the room was not silent. The quiet _clicks_ and _swishes_ of agitated mecha blended together in a soft purr of noise.  Ironhide had disassembled some kind of missile launcher and was cleaning the parts. Optimus, his arms folded and head bowed, might have been a statue. 

Kim stumbled to a stop and blinked at them. Then, slowly, she resumed her course toward the steps.  A deep blue (almost black) and white mech Kim didn’t know started toward her. Jazz stepped lightly in his way. Neither of them said anything aloud. Kim forced herself to keep walking toward the steps.

There wasn’t a standard procedure for this: if all your informants were doing the same thing, was the good idea do exactly what they were doing? Or was it absolutely vital to _not_ do what they were all doing?  Kim climbed the steps slowly, weighing her options. 

She sat down on the little landing half-way up.

She put her hands on her knees and leaned against the railing and breathed. Being quiet? she could do that. She sat. She breathed. Slowly, she glanced around at the gathered mecha.

They would know she was nervous. Kim tried to be less nervous and just wait.

Were they just waiting? Or was this a meeting?

“Now just hang on,” Jazz said suddenly. “We’re all acting like we know how the humans are going to take it. We don’t.”

Cliffjumper said, “The statistical models—”

Ironhide stood up. “Jazz is right. We’re rotten at predicting what humans will do. And we got us a human right here.”

Oh, hell.

Springer, large and verdantly green, said, “How do we transmit data to Humans?”

One of the huge screens flicked on. It showed the Earth.  There were lots of lines scrolling across it. Kim stood up.  Changing her position did not make the picture more comprehensible.

“The propagation of the electromagnetic disturbance follows this line of deployment,” Springer said.  The voice he had chosen was confident with a slight mid-western accent. “You will notice the dispersment   is very thorough.”

“Ya skipped a step,” Ironhide said. “Kim, one of the things we’re trying to figure out how to tell Keller is that Megatron arrived in a big ship last Wednesday night.”

Kim gripped the railing. “He’s not—you all said he might be dead?” She glanced at Optimus, but he was still focused on the floor between his peds.

Softly, relentlessly, Ironhide continued. “He’s not dead. Springer’s team followed him from Cybertron. He spent a year there raidin’ databases and breakin’ into old archives. And then he returned here and released four times ten to the twenty-fifth joules into the Earth’s magnetic field.”

“That’s…it doesn’t seem like a very effective attack,” Kim said into the waiting silence. “I mean, was anybody even killed? And it’s already dispersed. Hasn’t it?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. It was Optimus, finally, who broke it. “Kim, it was not a coincidence that our bridge staff kept misidentifying the disturbance as sunspots. Some of those specific wavelengths of interference are well known on Cybertron. They are a common hazard during the solar maximum—roughly, every three-hundred and seventy-three years.”

“So he went home, went on a wild research binge, came back and dumped a whole lot of energy into the Earth’s atmosphere because—what, he’s homesick? Was it ambiance?”

Optimus, at last, focused his optics on her. “The direction of his research implies that he wishes to influence the Earth’s production of energon,” he said heavily. “It was Jazz, analyzing the files brought by Cosmos and the others, who noticed the pattern. Mr. Keller will be here in three hours. And I will have to tell him that the Decepticons have set their sights on Earth.  We are not picking off strays or abandoned malcontents. We are facing an invasion.”

For a moment, Kim couldn’t breathe. At last she managed, “How many more are coming?”

“That is what we are trying to explain. They are already here. And they mean to either stay or strip this planet to bedrock before they leave.”

“But—how many _more_ ships? When?”

Everyone was looking at her. Kim was familiar enough with mecha now to read confusion in their posture. It was Cliffjumper who said, “There are no more ships. The _Nemesis_ is the last of the dreadnaughts. There’s maybe fifteen, twenty guys here on the ground, forty more on the _Nemesis_. He has no base on Cybertron. This is our chance to finish him.”

“At what cost?” Optimus snapped. Chromia stepped into his overlapping range and he subsided.

Ironhide said, “Our best chance to defend the humans is to defeat the Decepticreeps. And now that we have some idea what they want, we can figure out how to do that.”

“All due respect sir,” Strongarm said, “Our hypothesis about their objective is ridiculous. They can’t possibly, seriously expect….” She trailed off under the heat of Irohnide’s stare.

Kim said, “So…they _can’t_ increase energon production? It’s going to fail?”

There was another long pause. Jazz finally said, “It’s kinda hard to say. Increasing energon formation….might actually work.”

For a moment, the weeks-long puzzle of energon twisted through her mind. What _was_ it? Why was it appearing now? And if Megatron could make more—abruptly, the image of a giant space ship rose up and blotted out that curiosity. “They’re going to attack.”

“They haven’t, though,” Ironhide said, and he was smiling. “They won’t.  They take overt action and Earth’s governments stop bickering and get serious. The Decepticons can’t take us all on at once.”

“Megatron does not care about casualties,” Optimus said wearily.

Kim shot him a worried look. “Um. So is this bad news or good news?” she asked in a small voice.

The new indigo and white mech took a step toward her. This time Jazz didn’t stop him. The new guy looked at Kim for a long moment and said, “Hound is right. These creatures are unfathomable. If we can’t predict human thinking, Megatron won’t be able to either. He’ll think of them as dangerous beasts. He will not take them seriously.”

“He will think nothing of slaughtering them by the millions,” Optimus said.

“As he has thought nothing of slaughtering us,” And oh, that was Springer, the new flier. “But these organics will fight. They are tenacious and determined.”

Kim felt a wave of warmth and realized her hands had started shaking. “Wait,” she whispered. “Wait.” She rubbed her face. “They think…they can make more energon form on Earth? And that’s—it’s got to take some time, right? And they—They can’t just nuke the planet to glass from spite. Can they? They need the planet….”

Kim had spoken very quietly, but a short, shocked silence followed when she finished. All the mecha were looking at her again. Chromia finally said, “No. Of course they cannot use such high yield weapons. That sort of electromagnetic disturbance would disrupt the harmonics they expended so much energy to create. They can’t ‘nuke’ anything. And they can’t afford the risk that the humans might.”

“Oh.” _So good news, then._ Kim sank down to sit on the step. “That is what we were all thinking. I mean, it was what _I_ was thinking. And I think—but we don’t talk about it. There’s no point.  But why were they _still here_? What could they want?” She laughed weakly. “Not just to wipe us out and be done with it. So hey.”

The indigo and white one leaned down over Kim, his optics flickering from wide to narrow focus. “Is it malfunctioning?” he asked.

“I don’t know about Keller,” Kim said. “I don’t know him very well. We had lunch at the same time in the DFAC once. But Lennox is going to be – my god, just to _know_ what they want! To be able to make some kind of strategy. Lennox is going to be so happy.”

“It does not understand,” the indigo and white one said.

Kim looked up at him and managed not to laugh. “I understand. I’m just not capable of being more scared then I already was. What’s your name?”

“Mirage.”

 _Mirage._ For a moment the word threw her: all of the guesses and panics and hopes about the Decepticons she had been trying not to think about—that they might just give up and leave Earth _and_ that they could decide at any moment to destroy human civilization as a way to deprive the Autobots  of allies _and_ the terror of thousands of years of war stretching out generation after generation of tiny human lifespans—Those had been mirages, and now, suddenly, here was reality.

Here was reality where maybe humans could fight. Maybe.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Kim whispered. “I need to go do human things now.” She collected her filthy and mostly-empty bag and retreated unsteadily to the Cold War office block. She made it to the restroom before she threw up.

~TBC


	2. Subtext

**Chapter 3**

Slipstream found her in Max’s room. “You have turned off your communications device,” he said.

“No, it’s broken.” Kim wiggled the feather lure she was holding, and Max pawed it lazily. “I…can’t think what to do about that. It’s funny. It’s like this huge, unsolvable problem. It’s like I can’t think. It almost feels like culture shock. Maybe it’s just regular shock.”

Slipstream closed the distance between them and tilted his head: Scanning her. “Your fuel supply is running low. You should eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“That may be resulting from elevated stress hormones. Currently—”

“Oh, stop. Please, Slipstream. I know I’m upset. But there’s no _point_ in being upset.  Maybe we’ll all die and maybe we won’t, but being upset won’t….” her throat seemed to close up and she rubbed her eyes. They were still dry. “I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be…” she was supposed to be noticing what Slipstream was doing. His response to observing her distress should be data, it should tell her something.  That was her job here, the only contribution she had in this terrible, terrible situation. 

Max caught the lure in her teeth and tugged. Kim’s hands were shaking again. She didn’t trust herself to gently tug back.

She should call home and tell them she was all right.  If she had a phone. If they had had any idea that she had ever been in danger.

Slipstream sat down on the floor. 

“Do you worry about things?” Kim asked.

‘Yes. I worry I will die before I complete my training. I worry I will disappoint Master Drift. I worry Jetstorm will act without thinking.  I worry you will determine I am not an adequate caretaker for Max.”

“I hope you don’t mind me visiting her. All the other humans are upset. Or really busy. Or both,” she added, thinking of Maggie.  “It’s not. I’m not checking up on you. I just needed….”

“I understand. It is satisfying to play with Max.”

Kim started to agree. Stopped. “Is that how you feel about it?” Or was he repeating something from research?

“Yes. Max is a thoughtful and friendly person.”

Kim looked at the cat and then leaned back, so she was lying on the floor. “Will you say that in Cybertronix?”

He said something. He said it, at her request, three times. Then Kim said, “Will you say, ‘I am the person designated Slipstream,’ in Cybertronix?”

He did, adding, “In Cybertronix there is a diminutive added because I am a student.”

“The word for person, was it the same?”

“Yes, the word glossed as person is _chirrup-descending whistle_.”

Kim attempted to repeat the sound.  The result was so funny that Slipstream reset his eyes three times before remembering to tap the language pack to show his amusement with a human laugh.

Kim closed her eyes, committing the new word to memory.  _Person_ , _person_. She needed a book on linguistics. More than one. And then a new idea floated up. “I can’t access the schedule,” she said. “Who is assigned to anthropologist duty?”

“It is me.”

“Rats. You can’t take me into town for new phone.” She had thought, for a moment, that the problem was solvable.

“Sadly, I cannot.”

“When is the next time—”

“I see a secure phone from the inventory has been assigned to you. You will need to go to the quartermaster’s office to sign for it.”

“Seriously?”

“This is a temporary solution. It is a military phone. It is subject to military restrictions and tracking. This is unacceptable. Your phone must be your property and modified by us. Prime is…firm on this point.”

“Oh.” _Oh, dear_. Well. One thing at a time.

“We may obtain the phone now. Afterwards, I am instructed to keep you company in the DFAC. It is past lunch time.”

“I don’t need—Yeah, okay. I’ve totally exceeded my species’ specifications.  And you’re good company.”

“I do not think this is true. You are frequently puzzled in my presence. The signs are clear.”

“If I didn’t like being puzzled, I’d have gone into another line of work.”

***

She felt some better after stuffing her face with chicken Caesar salad while exploring the functionality of the new phone. It had the schedule app. It had the text messaging system the ‘Bots used. It had the base ‘announcements’ feature.

It did not have the glyph app, which was frustrating, but also kind of a relief: one more thing, at least, she didn’t have to pay attention to just now. A reprieve, though she felt guilty to realize it.

The rest of the day was pretty awful. She kept the new phone open and ready, but she hoped nobody would call. Remembering Malinowsky, she spent the afternoon hiding in her room writing—with a pen in a notebook, this was not going to be digital—the details of just how awful everything was. She meant to write about how cowardly she had been in the face of uncertain doom and how miserable it was to have the possibility of concrete hope. After writing that, though, she found herself writing about the _thwum_ and _chwa_ of pulse cannons.

She wrote about the bridge collapse and every little light on Optimus’ dash gone dark and the utter, awful _silence_ of his unconsciousness.

She wrote about telling Ironhide to check Optimus over—though that had not been her call to make and it had been a shameful betrayal of professional standards.

She wrote about how strange the new mecha were. Blur had been so _faceless_. And Hound’s joints were all _wrong_. And she had pretended she hadn’t noticed, that it was fine, yay, aliens, cool. She hadn’t realized how lulled she’d been by the adaptions to human appearance and the nonverbals in the language pack.  And it wasn’t like you could hide feelings from mech sensors. They surely knew she’d been horrified and afraid.

It _was_ wonderful, wasn’t it? That they were alien?

In all of human history, this was the most important—

But she couldn’t even finish that thought. Important? Her friends—

Fixit in such despair he had to be sedated so he wouldn’t hurt himself.

Ratchet, who needed surgery and had to choose between barely-trained organics and a commando.

Bumblebee—out there somewhere, trying to get back.

Cliffjumper and Jazz, here and afraid. And Optimus—

\--With his sensors only half repaired and so tired, probably at this very moment trying to explain to Keller that the reprieve was over, the war was _here_ , the Earth Megatron’s next target.

And not a darn thing Kim could think to do to help anyone….  And how silly to think she could! War was very humbling.

She wrote it all down, every pitiful, indulgent, navel-gazing word. She’d keep it, she decided.  If she lived through this job, if humanity lived through this war, this would just be another record. And it should be remembered, by someone, how genuinely awful this was. And how many mistakes she’d made.

***

She was less scattered the next day, but no happier.  _It is still_ , she reminded herself, _the best job in the world. Imminent death not withstanding_. And to be fair, everyone in every other job was facing the same risk. They just didn’t know about it.

Then she stepped onto the balcony (her hair jelled and her sparkly unicorn shirt on because yesterday’s sloppiness was no way to work) and into a spectacular view of a 4-way argument between Springer, Ironhide, Bulkhead, and the new red and silver guy with two names.

The quarrel was in Cybertronix.  It wasn’t the usual silent disagreement she was used to, with the mecha involved on opposite sides of the room.  Was the conversation out loud because so many were involved? Were they yelling because they’d lost their tempers? Did the new arrivals not have the habit of arguing silently to keep the humans out of it?

Was observation by humans the reason for the silent arguments in the first place?

Cliffjumper and Strongarm were distinctly busy at the satellite interface. Surely not unaware of the argument—ignoring it.  Arcee, in her three smaller units, was glowering at the quarrelers.  Jetstorm was positioned in the archway leading to the ‘Bot commissary and sleeping room.

What was going on?

Springer was preening indignantly, his rotors standing out from his body like a fan.  Ironhide was _chirruping_ and hissing at the new  guy with two names, who _click_ ed and hissed back. Bulkhead chimed in occasionally, short bursts of purrs and beeps directed almost pleadingly at both Ironhide and the new guy.

Hmmm. Kim let her breath out slowly.

This was why you lived in the community, to watch moments like this. What a shame she had no idea what they were arguing about.

Slowly, she retreated back to the corridor and then rushed down converted office on the end where Slipstream had set up his cat habitat.  Luck was with her—Slipstream was there, Max curled up and sleeping on the warm spot he kept on his leg.

“Hi,” Kim said. “Watching orbit?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “We have found two contaminated communications satellites today. They have had to be shut down until we can devise a plan for repairs.”

“Dang.” The Decepticons weren’t wasting any time. “So. I don’t suppose you’re also following the fight downstairs?”

“Of course.” His head flicked up and to the side briefly, running a quick sensor scan over her. “Almost everyone is.”

“Could you…tell me what they’re arguing about…?”

“Certainly! But why—oh.  Prime has decreed that Wheeljack is to excise Ratchet’s lost protomatter. Wheeljack has refused because when Ratchet was informed he called Wheeljack a…hmmm.  It actually renders well in English. A ‘mad scientist with delusions of competence’ and a ‘jumped up engineer who has no business pretending he’s a medic.’ Yes.” He nodded.

Kim blinked. Even from Ratchet that seemed harsh. “Wheeljack—that’s the red and silver guy with two names, right?  He’s offended now and won’t do it?”

“No. He has not announced offense. He has only said it is Ratchet’s right to choose, and he will not force him.  Also, he has said only a fool would submit himself for surgery by an engineer. This might have been sarcasm, although he did not transmit glyphs indicating so.  Wheeljack was once considered a very great engineer and he has been acting as a field medic.”

Oh. Wow. “Why doesn’t Optimus just settle it?”

“He left this morning for Washington. We’re flying in cargo planes again.” He shuddered elaborately. 

Kim tried to push aside the surge of worry. “Flying? Is that safe? What about the navigation interference?”

 “Military air travel resumed its normal patterns last night.  Commercial travel is still suspended. They do not know the cause of the disturbance and are afraid of liability. It will probably resume in a few days.”

“Oh. But. Is it safe? The Decepticons could do it again. Couldn’t they?”

Slipstream _ssshd_ and _wooshd_ with a systems check. “It would be a very inconvenient weapon if they could, shutting down both air and bridge travel for hours or days! However—no. That is not a concern. The energy cost—you could power a dreadnaught for a couple of years on what it took to distort a planet’s magnetic field, particularly one as strong as you find on earth. Oh, my.  Wheeljack just called Ironhide…a very nasty name and stormed off. Bulkhead is following him.”

“What is Bulkhead in all this?”

“An old friend of Wheeljack. He would like him to be reasonable and cooperative.”

“Wow.” Kim tried to think up something else to say, failed.

“Springer just apologized for Wheeljack’s behavior. And sort of told Ironhide ‘I told you so.’ Both at once. The nuance was impressive.”

 “Oh,” Kim said. “Damn.”

“Damn, yes,” Slipstream agreed. “Damn.”

“What will happen?”

“Ratchet will certainly submit to the surgery.  He will not ignore mechanical realities.”

“Will, um, Wheeljack do it? The surgery?”

“Of course.  He has a reputation as difficult, but…to deny medical care is _beyond_ difficult, if you know what I mean.”

It would have been so comfortable to just sit here with Slipstream and Max. And gossip counted as work.  But it was hiding, to stay here where it was easy. Especially with so many new mecha on the base. Kim thanked Slipstream for his help and headed back out of the Cold War hallway.

Optimus was off-base. On his way to Washington. In a cargo plane. Damn.  Kim had been hoping he’d spend the day in recharge repairing his sensors.

Damn.

She headed to the ‘Bot commissary. It was another huge, open space, but this one was decorated (that must be the word) with seats and tables of varied and varying elevations.  The furniture was carved out of stone or—here and there—sculpted out of scrap metal. It was an aesthetic Kim was beginning to find pretty…but still found intimidating and exhausting. She had been half-hoping it would be empty, but no.  She was almost sure that was Hound and Mirage sitting at a table in the middle, containers of energon and lubricant spread out between them. 

Hound—if it was Hound—was now decorated in desert camouflage.

Kim shifted her bag and began the longish walk across the cavern. “Morning, guys.  Nice color scheme, Hound.”

He preened, lifting his arms to admire them. “Isn’t it? For a species so imprecise about color you have an amazing artistic repertoire.” He was a light tenor now, the words slower and rounder. It was a fast adaptation.

“Thank you.  We actually do take it seriously. It’s just…you know…and some of us can’t even see the whole color spectrum.”

Mirage inclined his head. “No, your species can perceive only a limited segment of the available spectrum.” His voice had expression now, and it sounded slightly snooty. Kim wondered if he meant it to.

“Um, no. I mean some people can’t see red. Or green.”

“Great Scott!” Hound said. Kim didn’t laugh. Instead she found the footholds built in for the minicons and began to climb the stone cube they were using for a table.

“So, I see you’ve both been exploring the language packs,” she said.

“English is very imprecise.” Yep. Mirage meant to sound snooty.

Kim was sympathetic anyway. “It is. Even other humans with a different native language complain about it.”

Hound leaned down. “I am told you are a human to ask for advice on Earth matters?”

“Yes, that’s part of my job.”

He opened and closed his three-fingered servo. “Most of the others here on Earth have altered their appendages to a more human shape.  Is this alteration necessary for human interaction?”

“You are too attached to trivialities,” Mirage said.

“I have it the way I want it.”

“Um, no. Probably not at this point. All the humans you’ll interact with are already used to being around mecha. And the most startling thing about you is your size, which we can’t do anything about. Keep your hand the way you want it. Maybe, pick up humans with both hands. If you need to.”

Mirage’s face plating shifted. “ _Pick up_ humans?”

“Humans get carried a lot.  It’s better to ask first, don’t move too fast. Hold them fairly close, we won’t be offended.  You should have a protocol for that.”

“I begin to see why the folder for human interactions is so large.”

Kim smiled sympathetically, hoped he’d understand it. “I would, um. If you want some advice? Servos are way less important than faces.”

Hound nodded. His neck still had too many joints, so it was still weird. “I have noticed that everyone generally keeps their helm armor retracted. I had initially assumed it was a sign of great confidence and safety to leave sensors, intakes, and vocal apparatus unshielded so much of the time.”

Kim shook her head. “No, it’s us. We’re hard wired to pay attention to faces, and to think of things with faces as people. You’re about to do a massive reformat, right? Root form too?”

“Yes, a three-stage transcan. It is very arduous and will use a great quantity of resources. I was surprised it was ordered.”

“Yeah….” Kim said. Of course it was ordered. It must have appalled Optimus to dedicate so much energon to the task, but survival depended on human goodwill and comfort.  Having new mecha wandering around looking like weird alien _machines_ would trigger his allies’ xenophobia. “About that—the more mobile you can make your face plating the more you can use it to convey expression. And that really helps. We can’t see your EM fields and we can only read glyphs on external devices—and most of us don’t use them for that. So your voice, your body language, and your facial expressions are really important for communication with us.”

“I begin to see,” Mirage said. “You are a teacher. You are here to explain the ways and details of humans. I see the wisdom of that. Humans don’t live very long, but there are a lot of them and they are heavily armed.”

“Well, that’s part of it,” Kim said.

“She must also explain our ways to the humans,” Hound said. “For that reason, she lives among us and seeks out our company. I imagine it is a very difficult job— _they_ cannot simply download files of data.”

“Oh,” Mirage said. “She is like us, then. A spy. How amusing.”

Kim choked. “I’m not a spy!”

Hound leaned down. “You yourself go into uncertain situations to seek out data that is hidden or accumulate information about that which is unknown. It is in the orientation package, which Mirage would know if he could be bothered to read it. You are a spy, in our sense of the term, not yours.”

“The English word _espionage_ is weirdly limited and specific,”  Mirage agreed.

“But I’m not collecting information to use against you!” Kim protested, in horror. “My reports go to Optimus first! I would never—I’m not collecting information on your weaknesses to exploit!”

Hound tilted his head, scanning her. “The use to which the information is to be put is not the issue. Only the process of collection.”

“Perhaps it would prefer the term _scout_ ,” Mirage said.

“That term is specific to particular circumstances and positions in the assignment structure that do not apply here,” Hound said.

Mirage considered Kim for a moment and then—deliberately and a little awkwardly—shrugged. “War has broadened many categories.”

“No,” Kim said unhappily. “It isn’t like that. I’m supposed to….”

They looked at her patiently.

“Look, right now, hardly anyone know about you. About the danger from the Decepticons, about how there are aliens here. When people find out, we have to be ready with an explanation of what you’re like. How you’re interesting. Ways for us to get along. Humans—we aren’t ready for this. We’ve never had anything like this. I’m trying to help.”

Mirage pulled back his head slightly. “I apologize. I did not mean to cause it distress.”

Hound thought about this for several seconds. He said, “It seems to think we believe it means us harm.”

Mirage’s head snapped up. “That?” He leaned in and cycled his optics several times at Kim. “You are unarmed.”

Hound said, “You have seen them fight. They are brave and adaptable and impossible to predict.”

“This conversation being an excellent example.”

Kim sighed. “Look, I’m just…not a spy. Okay? Maybe, uh, consultant?”

“Very well,” Mirage said. “Let us consult. I have received a list of recommended alt forms from someone named William Fowler. I do not like any of them.”

“Oh. Well. What do you like?”

With a click the tabletop was covered with holograms of …race cars.

“Oh,” Kim said. “Those are…very nice.”

She was still trying to think of something to say about racing cars—were they street legal? Was the clearance high enough to handle a pothole?—when Cliffjumper strolled up.  He paused very briefly to trill a string of beeps and whistles at  Mirage. Mirage didn’t answer, and Cliffjumper, with a passable smirk, glanced at Kim. “Watch out for this one,” he said. “His sort can’t be trusted.”

Hound _tickety-beep_ ed and started to rise, but Cliffjumper was already walking away.

“What the hell was that?” Kim whispered. How had Mirage been here long enough to piss Cliffjumper off?

Mirage attempted another clumsy shrug. “It’s not important anymore.  All that is long gone.”

Kim had not known either of them long enough to push. “What makes this body style attractive as an alt?”

She stayed with Mirage and Hound until they were finished topping up their tanks and were ready to go shut down to run preparation programs.  Then she headed the other way, toward the infirmary. There weren’t any lessons, but the trainees were still busy, and she should be paying attention.

She found Arcee and Dr. Nomura arguing. She couldn’t tell what they were arguing about because they were doing it in Japanese.

Well. Damn. What Kim wouldn’t give to just download languages into her head!

Carly was on the shelf, carefully copying a diagram showing on a table screen.

“Do you remember it better if you draw it yourself?” Kim asked.

“Well, I understand it better.”

“Any idea what that’s about?” Kim pointed to the quarrel below.

“Nope. I’m staying out of it. Wheeljack is removing Fixit’s damaged processors later today, if he’s stable.  June and I are supposed to help.”

Kim stepped backwards. “Ooh. You’re busy.  I’ll—”

“It’s okay. I can talk as long as you’re asking me questions about mech repair.”

Easy enough. Kim opened up one of the folding chairs and sat down. “How will the procedure for Fixit go?”

Carly pushed the screen and notebook out of the way and held up one hand, indicating the top two joints of her pinky. “There are six damaged modules, each of them about this big.”

“Fixit will have to open up his seals?”

“No, he—He can’t open up his inner seal. Wheeljack is going to have to cut the membrane and then reseal it afterward.”

“Oh,” Kim said. “Wait, why? Is it because of his injury--?”

Carly sighed and pulled up her knees.  She seemed almost huddled in the chair.

“What?” Kim said.

It was a long moment before Carly answered. “So, Ratchet has translated the documentation—I mean tens of thousands of pages of specs and repair manuals. There are so many different models, engine structures, it’s…. Anyway. He’d give the trainees the section relevant to what we were doing. Like, after we cleaned out Cliffjumper’s pond scum, we got the blueprints for his chassis.”

“Okay, yeah. I guess I knew that.”

“But Ratchet had it all translated into English. And when he regained consciousness after his injury, he shifted all the files to the server. We can look at all of them now.”

Kim nodded encouragingly, “That sounds useful.”

“So I looked up Fixit’s documentation. And it’s….”

“Yeah?”

“He’s a very basic model, completely mass produced. I mean they’re all mass produced, but there are usually factory upgrades or… You know these cognitive processers we’re replacing?  They’re half the density of Bee’s or Ratchet’s.”

Kim swallowed hard. “Because he’s a Minicon?”

“Nope. I checked. Jetstorm and Slipstream have much better stuff.  And processors are supposed to last ten thousand years.”

“I thought it was thirty.”

“You’re thinking of memory. That’s quartz, so…. Anyway, Ratchet’s notes imply it would be a surprise if any of Fixit’s  processors made it even to six. They’re crappy.”

“Damn.”

“Kim, he’s not built for any kind of serious repair. His seals don’t dilate, they’ll have to be _cut_ and then manually re-sealed.  The inner carapace covering the cavity—Wheeljack is going to have to cut it open, too.  He’s going to install some little mods so it opens and closes for when we do the replacement in a few weeks. The mod will have to heal. Well, his repair nanites will have to ‘integrate’ them properly. At least his repair nanites have been upgraded—” She broke off suddenly, refusing to meet Kim’s eyes.

“Wow,” Kim said to fill the silence. “I didn’t know any of this.  You must have spent all day yesterday—"

“I haven’t told you the worst part. There’s a—it’s like a flier or advertisement—talking about Fixit’s model. Ratchet hadn’t translated it, but there’s a translation filter on the other server, and—no. Maybe I—maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the translation’s bad or it doesn’t mean what I think it means….”

Kim firmly didn’t let herself think about how bad it might be.  Calmly, she said, “What do you think it says?”

“Obedience coding. I think it says obedience coding. But even if it really says that—maybe it doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

Kim’s stomach was a tight, twisted knot.  This was not something humans needed to know right now. Carly didn’t want to believe it. Kim could steer her away—

Carly was assigned to Fixit’s medical team.  What a terrible betrayal it would be, to conceal this possibility in his history from his caregiver.  “I think it probably means exactly what you think,” Kim whispered. “Cybertron was pretty fucked up before the war.”

“What—no.  No, they can’t be—”

“They’re people, Carly. They’re people like us. And that is what people do: the powerful people exploit the powerless people.”

“No! That’s—they’re more powerful than _us_. They could force us. They don’t have to pretend to be or our friends or give us choices. If they were really _like that_ they could—"

Kim shook her head. “I don’t mean all stronger people bully all weaker people. I mean, in a society, as thing go on, power tends to, uh, get consolidated at the top. And that power will be abused unless there are barriers or protections to make sure _all_ the power doesn’t wind up at the top.”

“Oh, man….” The look on her face was familiar. Kim had spent a couple of years as a TA, leading sections in Intro Anthro or Social Problems to try to get undergrads to that exact moment of startled compassion or disappointment.

“Yeah.”

“So Fixit….”

“I don’t know. Emotionally, I can’t imagine he doesn’t have baggage from all this.  On the other hand, it’s been a really long time.”

In a small voice, Carly asked, “You don’t think it’s still active? I mean, ‘obedience coding,’ he doesn’t still have it?”

“Of course not! Or they wouldn’t have to sedate him to get him to accept treatment.”

“He was built to be disposable. He—Oh, he thinks he can’t be fixed. No wonder he—oh, I don’t know if you’d heard how he reacted—”

“Yeah. Maggie told me.”

Carly picked up her notebook, idly paged through the sketches. She was silent for a few minutes. “It should be a really simple procedure, taking out  a damaged part, growing a new part, popping it into the socket. On any of the others this would be _such_ a simple procedure.” And, oh, that was terror at the edge of her voice. Carly was nineteen, and she had never intended to be in a _medical_ field.  And now she was, and had a patient--a badly build, apparently fragile and high-risk patient, on top of everything else.

Kim could almost taste Carly’s despair.

“You said he had good repair nanites.”

“As good as the war frames. Which is _very_ good.”

“Who counts as a war frame?”

“Everybody else but Arcee, who has a speed-infiltrator frame and an experimental repair nanite system. Oh, and Ratchet, who has medical-grade nanites.  That’s a high energon cost, though. And Ratchet does things with them nobody else needs to.”

“You’ve seen the plan for the removal? Is Wheeljack going to be careful?”

“Oh, yeah. He sent us an animation that plots it out step by step.  Not that he expects us to be much help. My whole job is clipping the slit in the inner seal open.” She thought for a moment. “He has surgery tools as good at Ratchet’s.”

“Okay, then. You just have to understand why everybody’s being careful.”  Now, while Carly was moving away from hopelessness, Kim changed the subject: “There is something I’m confused about. Cosmos was hurt more than anybody, but nobody is talking about his repairs. He isn’t even in here. Are they hiding him because he’s a space ship?”

“He’s in stasis lock.”

That was familiar. “Yeah….Optimus mentioned that Wheeljack would put him in stasis lock. What does that do?”

Carly made a face. “Not _put_ him in. It was all he could do while we were there to keep him out of it.  They had to get the major leaks stopped and get him transformed before they could let him….” She bit her lip. “Okay, so being ‘dead’ for us is no brain activity? ‘Dead,’ for them, is their spark extinguishes. Their brain, well, their _processors_ , can be replaced. Memory isn’t a moving part, it’s quartz nodules. Protomatter—you have to have it if a mech is going to have a frame and repair nanites and a T-cog and support an active spark chamber. But the great thing about it is, it can turn off. Protomatter isn’t like human cells. Well, or maybe. You can freeze human cells if you do it right.”

Kim blinked. “You lost me.”

“If there is way more damage than the internal repair system can fix or if they get really low on fuel, the autonomic function is to just turn off everything but the spark chamber and put that into a sort of ‘hibernation’ mode. I bet Cosmos’ spark is a simple sine wave of about forty hertz right now.”

Carly flipped rapidly through the pages of the note book. She stopped on a page of seven or eight small…diagrams…drawings…abstract art? Some of them were just scribbles of color.  “This one and this one are copies of renderings Ratchet did of spark activity in a healthy, alert mech.  These others are…in the car on Thursday I tried to get Ironhide to describe what he perceives when he ‘looks’ at the EM field of another mech.”

“Wow…that’s….”

“Trippy! I know, right? Anyway.” She flipped to a blank page, took out a four-color pen and drew a black circle with a blue daisy inside it. “That is my best guess for Cosmos’ spark right now. It’s barely doing anything at all. And it is doing it so slowly that if it were visible light we could almost see it.”

“Carly, you’re amazing!”  It was not the best thing to say—informants who were focused on your opinion of them might watch what they said—but it slipped out. There was so much Ratchet had explained that Kim had not understood.

“Anyway, to answer your question, getting safely into stasis lock and getting someone out of stasis lock—because you _can’t_ do it on your own, you need help—is touchy. But right now, Cosmos is completely stable, which is good, because it is going to take months to fabricate the parts to fix him. Assuming, you know, the Decepticons don’t kill us all before we have a chance.”

Kim opened her mouth, shut it. “Are you really worried about that?”

“Aren’t you! They don’t want to talk about it, but there is a war ship here!”

How much should she say? Kim glanced down at Fixit on his pallet in the corner. Enough to keep Carly calm and focused on her job. “They won’t just openly attack.  Apparently, the Decepticons are doing experiments on Earth’s magnetic field, and it would mess them up if we defend ourselves too vigorously.”

“Convenient,” Carly said, frowning. “May…be.”

“Also, still sort of classified. Don’t talk to humans about it.”

“But—”

“We don’t know what’s going to happen, but it isn’t certain doom yet. So worry about your job. It’s important.”

“Is that—is that what you’re doing?” Kim was reminded, again, how young she was.

“Me and Epps and Lennox and June.” She glanced down into the infirmary where Dr. Nomura and Arcee were pointedly not talking to one another. “Even him.”

She made Carly walk with her to the DFAC for lunch.

**Chapter 4**

Kim sat on the shelf and held Maggie’s hand while Wheeljack removed the ruined processors from Fixit’s chassis. She had not really appreciated, before, how much Ratchet talked when he worked. Wheeljack only spoke to give instructions. The process was quick, though—in less than fifteen minutes, June was holding a tray with six grey cubes laid out on it and Carly was laying strips of gauzy tape over the slit in the inner seal.

Maggie scowled. “They’re _taping_ him back together?” she hissed.

“Different kinds of tape for different materials. The repair nanites will break it down to build the repair with.  It works for almost everything. Not armor.” Fixit had hardly any of that.

Maggie was still glowering.

Kim pointed out one if the large side-screens. “See that? It’s his telemetry. Nothing is blinking, so there’s no alarms.  The graph on the right is spark activity. As long as it stays in the middle and nothing gets pointy, he’s fine.”

Maggie didn’t answer, but squeezed Kim’s hand harder.

Kim wondered if Fixit had told Maggie much about life on Cybertron or who he’d been before the war.  She wondered if it would help to know. She wondered if this was crossing a line, and if she should cross it anyway.

She didn’t get a chance to dwell on it. As soon as Wheeljack had closed Fixit and readjusted his energon drip, he marched over to Ratchet. “You’re next,” he said.

Kim had not realized Ratchet was awake. He had not kibitzed this procedure the way he had June’s replacement of Optimus’ chips.  He said nothing to Wheeljack now, at least nothing out loud.

Maggie tugged Kim’s hand. “We should go. Ratchet won’t want extra humans around for this.”

“He built the bridge, didn’t he?”

“Mostly, yeah. You think he’s grumpy now…he’s mellowed a lot over the last three years.”

***

Kim had settled on the balcony couch to work on field notes when she noticed Ironhide pacing the assembly area. Right. Ratchet was in surgery and Optimus was at a meeting in Washington without him. Kim slid her laptop back into her bag and casually strolled down the stairs. “You know,” she said, “I’ve never actually seen the artillery range being used for actual target practice.”

He looked down at her for a moment, then transformed into the sleek, black, extended-cab pickup.

***

They burst out of the tunnel at highway speeds. Kim pushed back into the seat with her toes and glanced at the seatbelt. “Did everyone drive this fast on Cybertron?”

“Naw. Too much congestion before the war. To much damage to the roads after it started. And there were snipers. I remember one time Ratchet was…” He sighed. “It don’t matter now. None of it matters now.”

Okay. Might as well talk about the elephant in the room. “Wheeljack seemed to do a fine job with Fixit.”

A rough-sounding laugh. “I’d hope so. He’s a genius.”

“So Ratchet will be okay.”

“Yup. As long as Jackie doesn’t get creative.”

“What does that mean, in the context of an infamous engineer?”

A pause, then, “Never mind. Just something else that was different before the war.”

They were roaring past the NEST motorpool now.  Ironhide wasn’t the only vehicle on the road, but when he came up behind someone he solved the passing issue by pulling off into the desert to go around them. “We can’t go all the way out to the range,” he said suddenly. “I’m technically in charge, at the moment. I should stay close to home.”

“That’s okay.” The turned off the paved road onto  a dirt road that looked like it would lead back behind the mesa—and accelerated. Kim took a breath, reminded herself of Ironhide’s fanatic safety protocols, and said, “Jazz getting some rest?”

“Yeah. Long overdue. He’s been running tactical analyses…since Thursday, I guess. Dang.” He caught air briefly, springing off a rock, and came down with a bounce of shock absorbers. “Wasn’t that a good one?”

“Uh, yeah. Great!”

“Aw, Kim. You aren’t nervous, are ya’?”

“What? no!”

“Didn’t Optimus take you off-roading? I know there was a national park up there—what was it? Baker-Snoqualmie?”

“No, _the semi_ did not take me off-roading!”  

“Shame. One of the best parts of being on Earth.” He drove in big circles out in the desert, dodging cacti and boulders at speeds Kim wouldn’t risk on a paved road. The seat belt was snug, and Kim held onto the steering wheel with both hands.

When, finally, he stopped, the brakes hit so hard he rocked several times on his tires. “The excision is done,” he said softly. “Textbook procedure.” The west Arkansas tones of his persona were gone. “Ratchet—from here on out it’s just recovery.”

“Thank goodness,” Kim whispered.

“We would say, ‘Primus is merciful.’”

“Yeah…Um, you doing okay?”

His torque engines revved restlessly. “Prime is in Washington with Chromia, Drift, and Jetstorm.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“But that’s yer answer. Prime is in Washington with Chromia, Drift, and Jetstorm. And we don’t have a functioning ground bridge.”

Right. No. No ground bridge to send help or evacuate the injured if things went wrong. “Are Keller and Mearing there?”

“Yeah. Keller and Mearing are there. And Lennox.”

“They understand what the stakes are here. They won’t…they won’t let anything happen to them.”

“Don’t get me wrong. It is better this way. Lately, he’s been more worried about me then about watching his aft. He’s probably safer without me in the way.”

The pain behind that confession was unbearable, and the words “I’m sure that’s not true—” were mostly out before Kim realized how insultingly stupid they were. “Damn. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I cannot imagine being at war for thousands of years, what this has done to all of you.”

“No, ya’ can’t. I thought about that, when I was in orbit, studying the histories Bee and Cliffjumper sent up. Your wars are over so quickly. You end them. You forgive and forget and move on _so quickly_.  Part of that is your short lives, of course. It may be a gift, the little time you have been given.”

“We don’t think of it that way.”

“No. You have such little time with one another.  Hm.”

Hm?  “Something wrong?”

“No. Ratchet has shut down. The telemetry for his repair cycle is perfect.”

“Just to be clear, everybody on base is watching his telemetry?”

“Well, everyone who isn’t off-line. And also the group in Washington.”

No medical privacy at all. “Has it always been like this? Even before the war?”

“Like what? Oh.  Following the reports in real-time. Naw, normally it would only be close friends.  There’s just so few of us here….” Ratchet was the only real doctor and no one to take proper care of him.

Kim sighed.

“Ready to head inside, Kim?”

“Oh. Sure.”

***

Maggie, June, and Carly were waiting on the balcony sofa when Kim got back. June said, “Maggie tells us you have food. And beer.”

Despite the nibble of guilt at the thought of taking the evening off, Kim felt a surge of elation at the thought of spending a few hours with humans—heck, humans she liked, even.  “Not a lot of beer, and it probably isn’t very good.” She motioned them toward the double doors at the back of the balcony. “Also, Carly can’t have any.”

“She’s doing a grown-up job,” Maggie protested.

Kim shook her head. “Her myelin sheaths aren’t finished yet.”

“Fine with me,” Carly said. “Beer is disgusting.”

Canned stew isn’t fantastic, but June used the electric kettle to cobble together some mac and cheese to go with it.  Maggie, digging around in the bin of questionable shopping left over from Kim’s Medford apartment, found a tin of smoked oysters and jar of marinated artichoke hearts. “Glorious, mate. Got any crackers?” Kim did. Crackers were a staple. She was out of soda, though. And napkins. And corn chips and refried beans. She was going to have to go shopping soon….

June, sprinkling the last of the cheese (both cheddar and parmesan, but best not to think about that) into the noodles, glanced at her phone. It was the third time Kim had seen. “Expecting a message from your son?” She asked. “What’s his name, Jim?”

“Jack, but no. I’ve got Ratchet’s telemetry.”

“Wow,” Maggie said. “Who set that up?”

“Ratchet did.” She glanced at the screen again. “He’s doing fine. It’s kind of amazing, how much difference the excision made.”

Kim peeked over her shoulder. The graph displayed on the phone’s screen was pure gibberish to her. “Oh. What about Windblade’s bent rotor?”

“Still bent,” Carly said. “She won’t let Wheeljack near it, and it isn’t a serious injury. So.”

“Why doesn’t she like Wheeljack? Is it because of the infamous-engineer-not-really-a-medic thing?”

Carly frowned. “Well, I assume.”

“Not at all,” Maggie said. “Apparently he is not sufficiently deferential to Prime.” 

“Where did you hear that?” Kim asked.

She shrugged, “A lot of mecha come through, bringing in supplies.”

Sitting around the desk on chairs filched from other offices, they ate dinner and shared the latest ‘Bot gossip. At some point the conversation shifted to how they’d each arrived here and where they would probably be if they weren’t in a secret underground base working with aliens. Although they differed quite a bit in age and experience, compared to the utter alieness that filled most of her days, talking to other women was poignantly familiar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had forgotten, when I started Xenoethnography, how much I loved Hound and Mirage back in the 80s. Gosh. And Wheeljack was a hoot. And I wish I could find a spot for Grimlock. Although, maybe not. Masks by L. Mouse at fanficdotnet does such wonderful things with Grimlock (and Preceptor) that I’m not sure what else there might be to say. 
> 
> I didn’t actually like Blur. But I disliked him in a wonderful way, so here he is. 
> 
> Also, Wheeljack is a bit problematic: Martha only knows Wheeljack as some kind of action hero/killing machine. So. I’ll have to sort that out. It will probably be more interesting anyway. 
> 
> One more thing: if color interests you, Radio Lab has a whole episode about how color is culturally constructed and physically/biologically processed.


	3. Syntax

Chapter 5

The late night couldn’t really be described as  a party, but it had gone on until after midnight and Kim slept in the next day. It was after nine when she finally came down the balcony stairs.

The yellow Volkswagen bug was waiting at the bottom. “Bee! You’re home!”

He beeped happily. At the same moment, Kim’s loaner phone vibrated the arrival of a text: NEED A RIDE INTO JASPER FOR ANYTHING?

“Yeah! I need a new phone and to do some shopping. But can they spare you?”

MY CURRENT ASSIGNMENT IS MONITORING INTERNET TRAFFIC FOR DECEPTICON SIGHTINGS. I CAN DO THAT WHILE DRIVING. He beeped again.

“Okay! Thanks, yeah.”

He played a few bars of “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head,” and texted: GET A JACKET.

It was raining, a cold patient drizzle that had turned the desert to mud. “Huh,” Kim said. “I didn’t think it rained a lot in Nevada.”

GLOBAL IRREGULAR WEATHER PATTERNS. I WOULD HAVE BEEN BACK YESTERDAY, BUT TRAVEL WAS DELAYED BY A HURRICANE.  

Really? “I need to check the news more.” It was hard to imagine anything in the outside world was as interesting as what happened at NEST.

POSSIBLY.

“Did the thing Megatron did with the magnetic field cause the weather problems?”

NO MODELS OF ATMOSPHERIC IMPACT ACCOUNT FOR RECENT WEATHER.

“Oh, so it’s a coincidence?”

THE ODDS OF IT BEING A COINCIDENCE ARE ONE IN SEVEN-HUNDRED THOUSAND.

“Huh.”

Bee did not ask where she needed to go, and Kim didn’t mention it.  Unspoken between them was  that the first stop would be the residential street where Raf lived.  In fact, Bee had barely come to a stop before the door was yanked open and a dripping tween flung himself into the passenger seat. “Aw, man, Bee, where have you been?”

Bee turned on his heater, all of the vents aimed at Raf. Softly, he warbled and chimed in Cybertronix.  

Raf laid his hands flat against the dashboard. “Where were you? I couldn’t even get you on email.”

Kim listened to Bee’s answer, trying to find breaks between individual words or a change in tone or rhythm that might indicate the end of a sentence. The sounds seemed to float through her and fade away leaving no clear memory.

“No, Bee. That doesn’t matter. Of course I don’t expect…..Really?...Oh.” He opened the glove box and withdrew a box. “Bee! This is—you didn’t have to!”

Bee _chirruped_ happily.

Raf was holding a miniature solar robot kit.  “This is really nice, Bee. Thank you.”  He glanced at Kim. “I’m upgrading my radio controlled car. I can really extend the power supply….” Smiling, he turned the box over in his hands. “This was really thoughtful.”

“Was it your birthday?” Kim asked.

“Yeah. Well. Tomorrow.” He looked at Kim thoughtfully. “He won’t tell me where he was. He  didn’t answer when I called him.”

“If he won’t tell you, I can’t either,” Kim said. “I….there was a transportation problem and he got stuck out of town. He wasn’t in any danger. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah… a lot of people had trouble with transportation. I don’t suppose giant alien robots had anything to do with all that.”

Kim bit her lip. She absolutely should not answer that, but oh, her job included _answering_ questions. It was almost painful to withhold information. Fortunately, Bumblebee said something before she caved.

Raf made a doubtful sound, but one hand patted the dash. “Yeah. I get it.”

She felt a little intrusive, horning in on their private moment. If it hadn’t been raining, she would have taken a walk around the block.

Did ‘Bots mind getting rained on? Did they notice? Or was it mainly the mud and sonar interference they complained about.

***

With one last ‘good-bye’ honk to Raf, Bee pulled out of the development to a cheerful (possibly kids’ song) about how much fun it was not to know where you were going.

“Phone first, please.”

A _plip_ of assent.

For a moment, Kim contemplated the usefulness of gossip. Then she said casually. “So, what’s the deal with Wheeljack?”

A caricature of a mob accent answered, “ _That one, he’s got a problem with authority_.”

“Does that have to do with being an infamous engineer?”

“ _I no know-oo_ ,” answered the Shmoo. An old cowboy added, “ _Before my time, young ‘un_.”

“Hm.  And I guess you haven’t been back long enough to know what the deal is with Mirage and Cliffjumper?”

Bee emitted a sharp _click_ that Kim recognized (from Ratchet) as disapproval. The borrowed cell phone announced the arrival of a text: A picture of a young Sean Connery in a tux.  The next image was a black and white photo of—who was that? A woman in a complicated head dress and a…jeweled bra? “Wait, is that Mata Hari?  You’re saying Cliffjumper has a problem with spies?”

The next picture was a white male, middle forties, balding…. “Who is this?”

The answer was a series of clips of children’s movies.

“Okay, Roald Dahl? Why— Oh.  Mirage was an entertainer who became a spy.”

A movie clip of Black Widow sashaying past Tony Stark. The radio implored, “ _Come on, you can do it, just one more push_.”

“Mirage is a _sleazy_ spy! Oh, scrap, does everybody feel the way Cliffjumper does?” Although, on second thought, clearly not Hound.

“… _definitely in a minority_ …”

“So what’s Ciffjumper’s problem?”

Another parade of famous actors. Or perhaps famous characters. _Dang, Bee you could just text the answer?_ Was he enjoying this? “Action heroes? Cliffjumper is an action hero?”

An affirmative beep, but the images kept appearing: Jan-Michael Vincent. Bruce Willis. Mark Wahlberg. Link Hogthrob. “Action heroes…who… are jerks?” Kim said.

_DingDingDing_

“Wait, Cliffjumper?”

“… _hey, now, he may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole_ …”

“Damn,” Kim said. Before she could phrase her next question, Bee’s radio was playing “Raise Your Glass” at a volume too high for conversation.

Okay, then.

***

She bought two phones; one to be connected on a regular phone-plan and mostly kept turned off, the other to be integrated with ‘Bot communications. At the grocery store she filled Bee’s back and passenger seats with bags of storable food.  Who knew when there would be a chance to shop again?

Kim ate an early lunch out in Jasper (her life had been woefully short of vegetables lately) and returned to the base to float between the usual spots and casually pick up gossip. Everyone was busy, but when beings could have multiple conversations at once, being busy wasn’t a reason not to chat.

She spent half an hour explaining the cat project to Springer, who clearly thought it was weird.

Slipstream did a lot of kibitzing about the alt-form plans of the new arrivals.  It turned out the only thing small enough for Blur was a Smart Car, which was not a shape that maximized speed or was considered ‘cool’ by the natives. Blur was not taking it well.

Bulkhead, when he heard Kim had gotten a replacement phone, swept her off to the infirmary cabinet where Ratchet kept the tech mods.  Bulkhead kept a set of earth-compatible tools in his subspace for using to upgrade his radio-controlled racing toys. In ten minutes she was back on the secure base wifi.  She could see the schedule, the alert system, the glyph traffic.  The data and special apps from her original phone—that was still gone. There was still no glyph translation or origination capability.  Even so, it was a huge improvement, and Kim’s outlook was noticeably more positive as she made her casual circuit of ‘Bot country.

The ground bridge was expected to be functional again in three weeks. Wheeljack was boasting he could do it in one, but that required taking some short cuts with the radiation shielding that would make the area uninhabitable to humans for the next twenty thousand years. Opinions were divided on whether or not he was kidding.

Thorough it all, Kim listened attentively, took notes, and asked follow-up questions. She didn’t let herself dwell on the mysteries of the morning. Or, at least, not too much: 

What, exactly, did the phrase “sleazy spy” mean to a species of asexual, inorganic, aliens?

What could Bumblebee possibly understand of Mata Hari or James Bond?

Of course, he had access to all the scholarly resources and could integrate half a dozen inputs at a time. Maybe he understood them better than Kim did.

***

She visited with the humans.  Since they couldn’t multitask nearly as well, they had less time to talk. She checked in anyway.

Five-thirty came and there was no interview on the mesa. Well, _of course_ not. But she missed it.

She nagged Maggie and Pierre into eating with her in the DFAC instead. They were both working frantic overtime to integrate the Earth-made repair parts into the ground bridge.

Unwilling to head into the dim, abandoned Cold War corridor to type up her fieldnotes, she took the elevator up to the mesa surface and settled into a shady spot with her laptop and notebook.  The rain had stopped, and the sun was out, although there were low, dark clouds to the east.  Her canvas chair was still sodden, but the rocks were mostly dry. 

***

_“Extremely Enthusiastic Destruction Specialists” has been shortened to “Wreckers.” Springer, Mirage, and Wheeljack are all that is left of what may have been the last Wrecker unit. Cosmos, Hound, and Blur were just old acquaintances who were along for the ride.  “Units, ranks, assignments. There isn’t really an army anymore.” Hound said that._

_What a mess. I can’t imagine._

_Cliffjumper disapproves of the Wreckers. He says they are disorderly, insubordinate, and have no self-control. That, coming from Cliffjumper. I don’t know what to make of it. I suppose I need to talk to Springer and Mirage about exactly what Wreckers do. _

_And WheelJack.  How bad can an infamous engineer-commando be? I built up an okay rapport with Cliffjumper and Windblade—and even Drift. It’s not like he’s going to hurt me._

_Names! Gah! I should have been asking about this before. ~~Shit!~~_

_~~~_

_Ironhide _ _That Which No Destruction Shall Penetrate. Although apparently that was only a name he took later. The original was a kind of high-tension cable that balanced forces. Completely untranslatable, at least to a Human who isn’t any sort of structural engineer._

_Slipstream An Assisting Force Drawing Something Along Behind Something Else.  His initial plan was to go by Assistant in English, but Bee explained the connotations of ‘secretary.’ _

_Jetstorm (according to Arcee—Note: confirm) not a direct translation, just an image he liked. In Cybertronix: Unexpected Disturbance. (!   Why?)_

_Drift  Is Controlled Motion in Useful Direction. Which is pretty much the opposite of drifting. So I don’t get it, and he isn’t here to ask directly. _

_Ratchet is the tool that re-knits damaged armor or torn protomatter. There is no English equivalent. _

_Cliffjumper is Cliffjumper._

_Mirage is Mirage. _

_Chromia Unexpected Illumination After A Protracted Darkness. Slipstream says First of Line don’t pick their own names (confirm?) and that she said she didn’t care how it translated into English. After a week of not choosing a name, Ironhide just called her Chromia. Slipstream doesn’t know why. _

_Windblade I asked  Slipstream, Ironhide, and Arcee about it. None of them gave me a coherent answer. I asked Windblade herself, she sent me the glyphs for weapon and airfoil, but I think that is a callsign not a name (???) Glyphs are not a transcription of their spoken language. Thousands of words exist that don’t have a glyph but are spelled out—I don’t think it’s an alphabet? Maybe a syllabary? I don’t even know the phonemes. Raf says some of the phonemes are out of human hearing range anyway. _

_Bumblebee This apparently doesn’t translate either. Three different ‘Bots gave me three different poems about curiosity and courage. I haven’t asked Bee himself yet._

_Note: ask Prime about full name and titles._

_~~~_

_Q to Springer: What’s it like, using the English communication package?_

_Your language is very slow, but choosing the correct word is difficult.  Particular words have multiple meanings. Some of the connotations are contradictory. That you modify meaning with ambiguous motions rather than efficiently with glyphs is inconvenient._

_So, not a fan?_

_It is an alien language—and more coherent than most. A number of important concepts often omitted by organic life are coded._

_??_

_You have elaborated logical pathways in acceptable specificity. The word ‘identity,’ although it is ambiguous and multivariate, does include (got him to show me glyphs:  ::: ~~()~~   and _লা _no_ _idea what that means.) Your conceptualization of ‘simulation’ seems correct._

_What about humans—what do you think of us?_

_You are puzzlingly small and unarmored.  You do not choose to modify yourselves. It is inexplicable._

_He excused himself for a meeting then. Ugh._

_~~~_

_June says Ratchet is doing really well. In a human, doing really well means sitting up in bed, talking to people, getting some exercise. Ratchet just lies there not moving with his optics dark while his miracle medical nanite colony—builds new protomatter or something.  He is expected to be up and at work on Tuesday. _

_Fixit doesn’t look any worse, but his damaged parts couldn’t be repaired and had to be removed and now he is being kept unconscious because the processers that are left aren’t working right. I wonder if it is a good thing or a bad thing—to put a patient who is depressed or panicked to sleep until they can be fixed? !  Humans you can’t put to sleep like that—our bodies need motion to be healthy._

**Chapter 6**

Kim tilted her head back and looked up into the gathering darkness. If she looked east and put up a hand to block the smudge of light pollution that was Jasper to the south, she had a good view of the night sky. Somewhere in that vastness there must be more. Somewhere in that darkness there must be other aliens. Humans weren’t alone, Earth wasn’t the only life. And someday…someday humans would be out in the stars, too. All they had to do was survive this next little bit.

And they might. They might.  Things weren’t hopeless.  Ratchet and Fixit would recover.  The Decepticon objective wasn’t mass slaughter. Six more Autobots had made it to earth alive.

The slight vibration of the freight elevator—no, not freight, they weren’t things—announced an end to her solitude. Kim gathered up her bag and steeled herself for a friendly greeting. Her smile felt stiff.  The intervening solar panels hid all but the very top of the backlit shape of Optimus stepping onto the plateau, but that little look was enough. Tension and uncertainty were both washed away by the surge of relief. He was home. Kim resettled on the boulder, her legs folded up under her, and breathed.

“Kim?” It was a question. Were his sensors still damaged?

“Yes. Here.”

He stepped around the last row of solar panels, moving more slowly than usual but still more lightly than any being his size ought to. “I apologize. I have missed another appointment.”

“No problem. I was behind in my fieldnotes. I, uh, probably would have had to cancel anyway. How was Washington?”

Another step closer. He descended to one knee, tilting his head for a sonar scan. “We accomplished  a great deal. There is a short term plan in place and a set of contingency responses. It would have gone a great deal faster, but the Russian kept trying to provoke Ms. Mearing and two of the NATO generals would not stop squabbling. How does a species with such short lives dither so much?”

Kim smiled thinly, “Tell me about it.”

“I apologize—”

“Oh, no. No. We resemble that remark.”

Politely, he dropped the subject. “Would you like me to lift you to a higher position?”

“It’s kind of chilly, actually. Maybe….” It occurred to her that he might want to be alone. It was late, he could suggest she go in.

With a tidy clatter, he folded and re-folded into alt and opened the driver’s side door.

Kim snatched up her bag and climbed in. “ _Thank_ you.”

“You are welcome.”

“How are you?”

He shifted slightly. “I am fine, Kim. Yourself?”

“Oh. No, that wasn’t the greeting ritual. How are the sensor repairs coming?”

“They are proceeding as well as possible under the circumstances.”

So not finished or even close to it. “I’m not your mom, but maybe you should be powered down and running the big repair cycles instead of goofing off with a human who is clearly a bad influence?”

The joke got only a perfunctory chuckle. “In 141 minutes Ratchet will end his repair cycle and undergo a complete reboot. I intend to be available.”

“Oh.” Kim swallowed. “How’s he doing?”

“Very well. The removal of the dead protomatter…has greatly speeded his recovery. I assume he will cover it in a lesson after he returns to duty.”

“That’s really good. I’m glad.” ‘Glad’ didn’t convey her relief, but as a word, it would do.

“Kim. There is something I feel I should say. To you, at least, although you cannot speak for all humans.” His hydraulics _swished_ restlessly.

“Um…okay?”  She hovered uncertainly for a moment, then slid to the edge of the seat and rested her forearms against the dashboard.  “What is it?”

“I am sorry. Our war has come to your home.  I do not know what will happen, except that surely, some humans will die.  It is possible that this planet and all its myriad, unique life will be  destroyed by our war.”

 _Scrap_.

“Regret is useless, but I do regret…. And, of course, you cannot offer forgiveness. But whatever comes, Kim, Know that I _am_ sorry.”

 _Oh, fuck._ How could he--? “Shit,” she whispered.

“You have a right to be angry,” he replied as quietly.

“Angry? Forgiveness? Well that would be—” For a moment her words tangled.  “Well, that would be two-faced of me, wouldn’t it? Have you looked at our history? Humans drag Third-World countries and innocent ecosystems into _our_ wars all the time!” Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Poland for most of the fucking twentieth century. How much, even, of Africa? For how many hundreds of years? Columbia. The ‘Mexican’ drug war—but it was the United States that bought the drugs and sold the guns!  She felt ill.  The human record was shameful.  “And you think _I’m_ going to—It’s no different than what we’ve done, over and over. To each other.  It’s just how war _is_.” Her hands were fists, uneven nails digging into her palms. 

“This is different. Your entire species is in peril. And it is not the fault of humans.”

“It’s not only us. How many planets has this war paid a visit to? In all the galaxy _we_ should be safe? Oh, well, that bad thing is happening to our neighbors, to you, it’s all so horrible you all barely talk about it, but the horrible should pass us by? Is Earth special or something? I don’t—I can’t--  You can’t apologize for something bigger than just you, and I can’t…pretend _you_ are the right person to blame or forgive!”

Kim snapped her teeth shut, dimly aware that she was nearly unhinged—yelling at an informant who was already upset—and ill on top of that!  It was wrong, wrong. She had to stop. She buried her face in her hands.

Although she had never heard the sound before, she knew at once what it was.  There was no confusing it for a word, not in either English or Cybertronix. It was also not like the mechanical sounds she had started to grow used to, living around mecha.  It was deep and long and resonant with layers of dissonant harmonics. And there—as poor Maggie had said--was the feeling like twisting wet wool.  It itched in her teeth and shivered like a chill down her spine. It was a heartbreaking sound.

 _They cry_ , Maggie had said. The warning had not prepared her for this desolate, agonized keen.

Kim opened her mouth to say something—you _say something_ when someone is crying, you don’t just leave them to their pain—but what words did Kim have equal to thousands of years of war, the loss of his planet, the danger Earth was in….?

He loved Earth, he did.  And while Kim could have no real concept of what he had lost, she knew exactly what he had hoped for.  They had hoped together. And Megatron had come back with a dreadnaught to destroy that future. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered miserably, realizing even as they slipped out that they were too weak to even be a caricature of comfort. The soft, mournful keening rippled around her words and continued.

Kim tried to swallow, failed. “Um. Maybe I’m intruding here….? I won’t be offended if you need—”

In answer the seat belt snapped tight. Since she wasn’t wearing it, the metal tongue clacked against the door frame.  The intended message was clear, though. Kim reached behind her with her left hand, wrapped the seat belt strap around it, and pulled it out until she felt tension. Her right hand she curled loosely around the base of the hula dancer.  It wasn’t a particularly comfortable position, but it would hopefully communicate the intentionality of her presence. If he wanted her to stay, she would stay….

She leaned her right forearm against the dashboard and breathed slowly. Her own feelings—and really, she did not have time now to sort them out—were not the point right now. She could keep it together. She could be calm. She could wait out this storm of grief and _grit her teeth_ together so she wouldn’t start wailing and screaming about how _unfair_ this all was—

He was glyphing. The little dash screen was flashing an uneven, almost spasmodic, string of untranslated symbols. Even the ones that looked familiar did not remain long enough for Kim’s slow, human brain to identify.  “I’m so sorry, I don’t understand,” she whispered.  She was gripping the statue base tightly. How useless that was—touch wasn’t a communication that meant anything to him.  Whatever comfort he needed, Kim was totally unequipped to offer it.

Her own tears started then, useless wetness corrosive with salt…. She wiped her face on her arm.

Slowly the keening softened and faded.  Kim sat back in the seat and tilted her head up to gaze at the smooth cab ceiling. She would not speak first. She could cope with the silence.

Scrap, maybe the silence was better.  What had been said so far had been awful.

“Kim, please enter ‘allow’ on your phone. I do not wish to smash its firewalls.”

Fumbling, she found the new phone. It was showing a message about a “trusted devise.” She tapped “yes.”  Optimus flipped through screens, made a dissatisfied sound, and uploaded the glyph app.

“Oh, _thank you_ ,” Kim breathed.

A new glyph appeared on the screen. It was labeled, _I sorrow with you._   “I think you will find this much more precise than the ambiguous English, ‘I’m sorry.’” He said.

Kim sent it immediately. “It’s a wonderful—” word? “Do you think of glyphs as words?”

“Yes. Although the precise gloss is ‘encoded concept.’ Of course, there is a philosophical debate over whether concepts exist before they are encoded. It has been a trope in our comic plays.”

Kim took a deep breath and let it out. “It would be stupid to ask if you’re okay,” she said. “Can I… Can I ask for a status ping?”

“I am coping. Do not worry.”

 _I am_ so _worried_ , she thought. “You’ve got about two hours to kill before Ratchet wakes up,” she said. “What do you want to do? Oh, hey.  I hear you go off-roading.”

“I’m sorry, Kim. Not tonight. I cannot perceive eighty percent of the visual spectrum, including infrared, and I have no fine detail in the EM frequencies.”

Kim stuffed down both her worry and her sympathy: Optimus wanted neither. “Right. No off-roading. Shall we go find the giant Jenga set? You will probably beat me, but I need to practice gracious losing anyway.”

He didn’t answer.

Kim waited, but not very long—mecha thought _fast_. “What would I offer if I were one of the others? The ‘Bots, I mean?”

“Kim….” Another hesitation. There was something, then.

“What would I have already offered if I were, you know, if I already knew your culture? If I were one of you?”

“Kim, you do not enjoy the washracks—”

“Right, yeah! Obviously.” Kim smiled brightly, although it was unlikely he could see it.  “That would be nicely distracting.”

“No. You find it unpleasant and uncomfortable. It is late, anyway. We are past the time you usually end your workday.”

Kim patted the hula dancer firmly to redirect his attention. “Okay, but think of it this way. I have recently had a chance to, um, reevaluate my definition of ‘uncomfortable.’  Driving mostly blind over alien mountains while a human uses abstract art to navigate, _that_ is uncomfortable.  Learning a new skill to comfort a friend who is having a really rough day is not, okay? It’s just not.”

“Kim,” he said gently, “I do not need a wash. I do not want to distress you.”

“Yeah….” She thought for a moment. “Let me be brave, though? Let me do the hard thing that will be worth it? My—my doubts and self-consciousness can’t be what is most important right now. Can you respect where I am with this?”

“Very well….”

Kim took a deep breath. “So, let’s do this right. How would I have made the offer?”

“Generally, the topic begins with one pointing out one’s own or one’s interlocutor’s filthiness. If the topic is taken up, then agreement is implied.”

“Oh. So… Have you had a chance to shower since Wyoming? You must have dried mud all up in your wheel wells. Not to mention all the dead bugs and bird shit.”

He rocked up on his shock absorbers and let out a single, surprised laugh. “We would say ‘organic debris.’  Otherwise…while most of the contingent here would approach one another in that vein, only Ironhide or Jazz or possibly Hound would say it to _me_.”

“Oh. Primes don’t get dirty?”

“Rather, to notice the Prime is dirty is to imply…neglect.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Do you—do you feel neglected? ‘Hide says there used to be attendants…?”

“I do not miss them. It is better to be surrounded by friends than palace staff. But you are an alien, a member of a different species. For you to point out that I am not kept pristine could be interpreted as an accusation of either general sloppiness or specific disrespect for my tenure.”

Kim bit her lip. This wasn’t about research.  She was off duty and he needed a friend, not a social scientist right now. But. They both found ethnography comforting. In a small voice she asked, “Might the word ‘blasphemy’ be used? Instead of ‘disrespect?’”

“Perhaps.”

“Hm. But we’re alone now.  So. Theoretically, I could say, ‘Wow, you’re a mess. You look like you’ve been digging out space shipwrecks,’ for example.”

“You’d be horrified to see how much mud I have in my seams.”

“We should do something about that. Do you have time before your next appointment?”

“Kim…you don’t have to—”

“Now what? I’m not good enough to clean mud off—what was it? Sacred Vessel?”

“Are you trying to annoy me?”

“No? Unless it would help? It would probably be distracting…?” No. “As much as I’d love to know why _me_ saying _that_ would annoy you, that isn’t what we’re doing now.” She snapped the seat belt into place. “Right now, we’re going to pass a little time pleasantly washing off organic effluvia. But you’re going to have to drive, because _I_ cannot carry _you_.”

It turned out it was much easier starting with a mech in alt. Scrubbing was physically demanding but not emotionally difficult. The brush and hose weren’t touching anything shaped like a body part. Exterior carapace had only the most limited tactical sensors, so not only were Kim’s actions not symbolically ‘personal’ to her, they wouldn’t feel particularly ‘personal’ to him.

Except, of course, that he was getting clean, which was personal.  And except for Kim reaching places he couldn’t, which communicated substantial trust.

Well, the only way to be worthy of that trust was to do a good job. She scrubbed. He was wet and slippery and Kim was grateful her sneakers were good as she crawled over his hood to reach the windshield…onto the cab roof to scrub the small running lights. The dirt sluiced off, different colored mud from half a continent.  The dead bugs—yes, she decided, it was a blasphemy to leave a friend covered in squashed mosquitos—got ardent attention. There were, thankfully, very few bird droppings. 

When he was clean in alt she stepped back so he could transform. She had expected this to be the hard part, but her shoulders were tired, and her fingers were pruney, and making sure she found all the dirt when there were so many crevices and joints and unexpected places to look…. No, she wasn’t remembering to be nervous.

When the washing part was done most of the water sheeted off nicely, but Kim took one of the five-foot towels and mopped up what was left. “Do we have time for a nanite coat?”

“We do not, but I will not need one for several months.” He stepped onto a dry part of the floor and transformed. The nearer door opened. “Come. It is time to check on Ratchet.”

Kim laughed. “You don’t want me in there—I’m soaking wet.” She would have to hold her bag out from her body or risk dampening her computer, notebook, tissues….

The door remained open. “Kim. It is not for you to say what I want. You are free to decline, if that is what _you_ want to do.”

Right. The wash had not been because cleanliness was important. It had been because he had needed the comfort. “Sorry.” She climbed in. The heater was on, jets of warm air coming from all his vents.

Kim rested her head against the steering wheel.

The torque engines came up, but he didn’t start forward. “I appreciate your consideration. From the beginning, you have been scrupulously kind and attentive to my comfort, even beyond the requirements of your professional standard.”

“I’m guessing there is a _but_ coming.”

“You must also be comfortable. And you are much more fragile and physically sensitive than I am.”

“Being wet isn’t a big deal.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“I’m home. This is the planet I’m from, the job I was trained to do. It’s not as bad for me as it is for all of you.  I’m….” Not _okay_. That was a lie. “I can keep going. It’s…” she closed her eyes, “None if it seems so hard when I’m with you.”

“I thought, perhaps, you would have less confidence in me after recent events.”

Kim blinked, confused by this confession. “You mean because of—of Washington and Wyoming? But we handled that! We were fine! We coped with that. It wasn’t even all that—well, I mean _you_ did all the work and it was much worse for you than for me, but still. We would have been okay.  We were doing great until the space ship crashed.”

“I was afraid. And you knew I was afraid.”

“Yeah, so? Anyone who was paying attention would have been—people get afraid. But machines don’t. I—I don’t think—I—No.” Completely confused by what she was trying to say, Kim closed her mouth hard and took a shuddering breath through her nose.

The silence was soft and unhurried. It closed around her, filling the warm cab, stilling the frantic suspicion that she was hurting him or failing him.  The air was heavy with a soft, sweet certainty. “Oh,” she whispered, “we’re okay?”

“Yes, Kim.”

“Oh.” She sat back and closed her eyes. “It’s about time to go to the infirmary?”

“Yes,” he said.

~TBC


	4. Stratification

**Chapter Seven**

He did not, as she had expected, stop at the stairs to let her out but instead transported her to the ladder that led to the observation shelf. Kim didn’t argue, but squirreled up the ladder and sat down on the edge.

Ironhide was already there, wiping a fluffy applicator over the grey streaks of Ratchet’s damaged nanites. Arcee stood to one side, watching a screen that displayed the readout from the medical interface.   How did they decide to do a direct person-to-person interface instead of a connection to a machine monitor? Probably she could ask Ratchet when he returned to work in a day or two. It was the sort of thing he liked to explain….

_Aw, Ratchet._

She could not call him a friend. That presumed way too much. But. She had missed him. Would have missed him a great deal if, well, if things had gone badly.

It wasn’t dramatic. One at a time the graphs on the display dropped and the flashing lights blinked off. Everything stilled but the spark monitors—and then all the graphs rose at once. Ratchet’s optics flickered to life and cycled. He looked impatiently up at Ironhide and then Optimus and grumbled in Cybertonix.

 _Click_ ing and whistling, Ironhide helped him sit up and then—unsteadily at first—stand. For a moment he stood between them, motionless, close enough to overlap. Then he beeped impatiently and nudged them aside. Neatly, he transformed to an ambulance, back to his root form, and then again into an ambulance.

Kim let out the breath she’d been holding.

 Ratchet pulled away in the direction of ‘Bot country. Kim took out her phone—oh, to have a real, working phone!—and checked the schedule. Ratchet was listed as _off-duty/recharge_ until eleven hundred tomorrow.

Thank goodness.

Below, Ironhide stepped beside Optimus, just within overlapping range, his arms folded and broad optics unfocused as he considered some silent conversation.

Right. It was after midnight. Kim should really go to bed.

As she was putting the phone away the schedule updated.  Optimus was now listed as _off-duty/recharge_  until oh-six-hundred. It was probably not enough, but it was something.

Kim flipped to the glyph app and sent _Thank you_ and (after a moment’s hesitation because she had not used it before, but thought it was a well-wishing and expression of goodwill like _namaste_ , _shalom_ or  _aloha_ ) _Flow of energon free of turbulence_.

***

Kim slept until nearly nine.  Running a little behind, it was hard to force herself to wash and gel her hair, dig out a clean tee shirt (it said “Cahokia Mounds” on it, which could be taken the wrong way, but ‘Bots wouldn’t), and put on earrings (she had the mods for them, after all). Her informants cared about appearance.

The infirmary was a whirlwind of action. Arcee, Wheeljack, and the trainees were getting Ratchet’s space back into shape before he returned to duty.  Carly had found a long, fluffy dustmop and was making enthusiastic use of it. Arcee and Epps were wiping down tables. June and Dr. Nomura were sorting cables by size and port compatibility. Wheeljack was doing something in cabinets. When Kim came in, he turned and pointed to her. “Good. I need a human.”

A set of tiny, round blades had been spilled in the cabinet, and some of them had rolled to the back and gotten stuck in crevices.

Well. She was going to have to talk to him sometime. “It’s Wheeljack, right?  I’m Kim. I’m the xenoethnographer.”

“I have not misidentified you,” he said briskly.

Carefully, Kim nudged up a sharp little blade with her fingernail and then lifted it on the palm of her hand to the case. “So…I was wondering what you thought of the English language pack…?”

He did not look up from sorting tiny blades. “It appears to be particularly detailed. A great deal of work must have been involved.”

 _O…kay._ “Are there any words in particular—”

“Excuse me. Stop there. Your species seems very nice, and I’m sure you are a congenial representative of it. I intend no offence, and I hope you do not perceive it as a slight. But your life span is simply too short to make it worthwhile to get to know you.  Surely you can see that under the circumstances there is no point in indulging in casual conversation.”

Taken aback, Kim considered giving up.  He was sort of obnoxious, though. She was reluctant to just retreat. “That…wasn’t actually a conversation. I was trying to collect data? Um.”

He tilted his head—sonar scan?—and asked, “On what were you collecting data?”

“I can’t explain mecha to humans if I don’t know how mecha think. But it is really hard to get at your authentic experience after you get adept at using the human interface packages.”

“Is this…human humor?” He asked after a moment.

“Um, no?”

He went back to sorting and placing tiny blades. Feeling both frustrated and embarrassed, Kim gave up. For now. Probably.

Geez.

They were just finishing up as Ratchet strode in. He frowned when he saw the gaggle of humans scurrying around his infirmary. The humans stopped tidying and looked up eagerly. Ratchet looked back with disapproval. “What?” he asked. “Have you never seen someone take a few days off before?”

It was June who started applauding. Everyone else joined in, including the two Bots--although Wheeljack seemed more amused than respectful.

Ratchet snorted.  “All right. That’s enough of that. We all have work to do.”

The applause died, but all of the humans kept looking at him. Ratchet threw up his arms dramatically. “Oh, for goodness sake—“ He stopped. “Where is Pierre?”

“Pierre is a bridge technician,” Dr. Nomure answered archly.

“hm. I’ll deal with that later. Just now—It’s time to tend to Fixit. We will begin as soon as Prime and Ms. Madsen arrive.”

***

The humans, except for Maggie, were sent to the observation shelf.  Maggie had been lifted onto the pallet and found a spot to sit cross-legged beside Fixit, close to his motionless form, but not interfering with the half-dozen cables and feeds that were connected to the patient. It was Maggie he saw first.  His optics came on line, reset, focused. “Hello.”

“How ya’ going, mate?” she asked gently.

Fixit glanced around. “There is going to be a disagreement, Maggie. It would be better if you left.”

“Ms. Madsen will stay,” Optimus said.

Fixit sat up slowly.  “Ratchet. I am pleased to see your recovery. My Prime. I apologize for the bridge failure that stranded you. I am grateful you did not come to harm.” English, but inflectionless.  He was not looking at anyone.

“Fixit,” Optimus said, “A fabricator has arrived on Earth. You will be repaired. Upgrades are possible, if you wish.”

“My commander,” Fixit’s voice had dropped so much it was difficult to hear, “why are you lying?”

“He’s not lying!” Maggie protested while Ratchet _click_ ed and _beep_ ed in indignation. “I’ve seen it. It’s making that three-armed surge protector thing, the thing that took us months the first time and failed anyway! It’ll be finished by next Tuesday!”

Fixit was looking only at Optimus. “I have made up my mind.”

“So I have been told.”

“Please, Prime. It would be kinder to the humans if they were not involved.”

“What?” Maggie demanded. “No. Stop!” she grabbed his nearer arm. Of course, her strength had no effect on him.

“Maggie. Beloved friend. Our position is too precarious. I am accessing the server data. Megatron is alive and he is here. I am too diminished to be of use. Energon must not be wasted on me.”

“Enough of this,” Ratchet said to Optimus. “Patients panic.  He’s no different than any other patient with compromised processing. Just let me use a medical override.”

“He is not panicking. This is a considered decision. I have promised him his decisions will be respected.”

“Thank you,” Fixit said, and with the tips of two servos, clamped one of the lines leading to his torso—it was as thin as a strand of spaghetti and hard to make out from the shelf—and tugged it out.

Maggie made a horrified noise. Ratchet threw up his arms. “Wonderful!”

“Kim?” Fixit said. “You know where Ratchet keeps the number four clamps. I would be grateful if you would bring me one. If you would consent to do me a favor?”

Optimus nodded once. Numbly, Kim began to climb down the narrow steps leading to the floor.

“Fixit, I have promised you autonomy over your own mechanisms. You must act according to your conscience. But I must also act according to mine. You are under my command. It is unacceptable that anyone under my command be deliberately and unnecessarily deprived.  If you refuse energon, so must I.”

Kim missed the last step and barely caught herself from face-planting onto the floor.

Fixit’s head snapped back and his optics reset three times. “No,” he said. “Unacceptable.”

“Your needless suffering and death are unacceptable.  I am responsible for your wellbeing. I will do what is necessary to ensure it.”

“No.”

“If I have so profoundly failed you that you believe I would allow you to extinguish, my primacy has been for nothing.” He did not sound impatient or angry—or even loud.

“No!” A wail this time. The keen under it set Kim’s teeth on edge and resonated all the way down into her jaw.

“This has gone far enough,” Ratchet cut in. “Fixit, you’ve lost a third of your processing power, and you have no dynamic resource allocation. You are glitching. Your conclusions are in error.”

Fixit…possibly couldn’t hear him. He was wailing. The sound of his anguish echoed weirdly off the floor.  Maggie had both arms around his shoulders, but she could not seem to get his attention.

Optimus said, “Kim, we will need the clip, please.” He waited, unmoving, unhurried, until she returned with a locking clip that looked like it would fit the spaghetti-strand energon drip.

Instead of taking it when she held it out, Ratchet lifted her onto the table. “It would be best if I don’t touch him just now,” he said. “Handle it carefully.”

Kim swallowed. “Right. We don’t waste energon.”

“Energon is hazardous to humans! If you’ve forgotten that, I can ask June to do this.”

Chastened, Kim shook her head. “No. Sorry. I’ve got it.”

Carefully, Kim snapped the clip over the free end of the little tube, and then tapped Fixit until he looked up at her. “Let me take it,” she said loudly. “Do you understand? This is dangerous for Maggie.” His keening didn’t diminish but the servo released, and Kim carefully untangled the line and handed it to Ratchet.

“Fixit?” Optimus said softly. “You know how this must end. Please.”

The hatch on Fixit’s wrist popped open. Optimus extended his own medical cable and snapped it into the port. “Kim, you and Ms. Madsen must step back. Motor control may be compromised, and you are both fragile.”

Kim took Maggie’s hand and gently tugged her backwards, carefully stepping over the nest of tubes and wires. Maggie was crying. Kim didn’t blame her; she was nearly in tears herself. She _would_ be in tears if she let herself speculate about the kind of life Fixit had lead that made just letting himself die seem like a reasonable response to his damaged processors.

“Fixit,” Optimus said softly, “drop your firewalls.”

It happened fast. One moment he was softly, heartbrokenly keening—and the next he slumped sideways like  a puppet with his strings cut. Ratchet caught him and eased him flat on the pallet. Fixit’s eyed dimmed, and their remaining light, instead of a steady glow, glittered and blinked. One of his servos slowly opened and closed. Kim put both arms around Maggie. She wished she had her bag; there were tissues in it.

No one said anything. No one moved. Even Fixit went completely still and dark.

Maggie buried her face in Kim’s shoulder.

The monitor high on the wall that showed Fixit’s vital signs began to shift.  One after another, the graphs dropped. Kim held Maggie still, so she wouldn’t look. One after another they zeroed out, everything except spark chamber integrity and spark activity.

This was not, Kim reminded herself, like flatlining. His systems were _designed_ to reboot. Compensating for brain damage or treating mental illness was much harder, much more protracted, and much less effective in human brains than in silicon and quartz processors.

The graphs all rocketed to high activity at once, oscillated for a moment, and then settled in the mid ranges. Optimus retrieved his medical cable and stepped back.  Fixit’s body began to _whoosh_ and _click_ with systems checks. Maggie spun around and dropped to her knees on the slightly-spongy surface of the pallet. She didn’t try to touch him but leaned forward so that she was in his line of vision when his optics came on line.

His optics blinked off at once.

Frantically, Maggie looked up at the monitor.

“Maggie?” Fixit asked without inflection. “Was I glitched?”

Her voice shook. “Yeah, mate. I think so.”

“I was so...afraid.”

“Are you—are you afraid now?”

“No. Maggie. I am _very_ sorry.”

“Oh, sweetheart. It wasn’t your fault. There was—do you have a memory of the accident at the bridge?”

Sadly—so much more sadness than mecha usually showed—"I could not keep up with it. I could not identify the cause of the problem.”

Maggie made an angry noise. “It was Decepticons fucking with the whole planet’s magnetic field. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Oh. How…unforeseen.”

Clucking softly, Ratchet began to disengage the lines and wires connecting Fixit to different equipment. Kim, numb with relief –or maybe still numb with horror—stepped to the edge of the pallet. It was too high to jump. Optimus held out a hand. Kim tried—hard—not to hesitate climbing into it.

***

The trainees weren’t done. Ratchet wanted a look at Blur’s suspension and Windblade’s rotor.  Kim sat on the shelf trying to pay attention. She failed.

She went to lunch at the DFAC with the trainees, but afterward, she retreated to her quarters—to work on fieldnotes, she thought.  Instead, she fell asleep.

Sitting up, groggy and too-warm, she looked at the clock. It was five-thirty-two.

Late. Fuck.

Snatching up her shoes and her bag, she raced for the elevator. The elevator was slow, slow, but there was time at least to get her shoes on before stumbling out and running between the solar panels to the rock-pile at the south face.

“Sorry!” she gasped. “Sorry. My bad.”

He turned slowly, the picture of patience. “You are generally very punctual.  Am I to interpret your  lateness as  an expression of anger?”

“Scrap. No. I—I fell asleep.”

His head lifted, optics changing focus in surprise. Then he frowned. “Humans sleep behavior is not completely under conscious control.”

He seemed interested rather than annoyed. Kim breathed an inward sigh of relief. “Nope.  A lot of poetry, songs, television episodes go into that.”

“Still. This behavior is unusual for you.  Your physiology is more susceptible to stress damage than ours. Have recent events harmed you?”

“No. Don’t worry.” Her chair had been opened.  She sat. She changed the subject. “Was there a reason you thought I might be angry?”

“Today I threatened to abandon the defense of Earth because of an ethical issue. It would be understandable if you responded with doubt or resentment.”

“Oh. No. That wasn’t really—I mean, _yes_ , obviously, you meant it. But because you meant it, there was no way Fixit would let it happen.” She looked at her bag, did not take the notebook out, set the bag on the ground. “It was awful. It was cruel. But not as bad as forcing him would be. I understood it.”

He didn’t answer. Kim buckled under the pressure of the silence. “And it could be w—that is, at least you guys can just go in and _fix_ mental health problems. An organic brain would be so, _so_ crazy after a few thousand years of war.”

“Fixit’s …issues…are not caused by the war.”

No. Kim guessed not. “He was made to be disposable, wasn’t he? That’s why he believed he was going to be thrown away. He wasn’t meant to be repaired. And I think in a way he was actually trying to make it easy for you. The inevitable.”

“Who else has come to this conclusion?”

“Carly. Definitely. I don’t know about the others. I don’t know what Maggie knows.”

“Fixit undertook the assignment knowing it would be dangerous. I have deployed mecha into combat thousands of times—friends, comrades, good Autobots. I have sent them in…even when the projected casualty rate was one hundred percent. But it is a far different thing to stand by adequately nourished while a loyal comrade starves….Fixit believed I would allow that.”

“He was glitched.”

“Kim, although I never wielded the Matrix to create what you are calling a ‘disposable’ person, I had presided for over a full _vorn_ before I managed to halt the practice. Sentinel—No, my excuses are irrelevant.”

Kim closed her eyes, nodding. This was not the ugliest truth an anthropologist had had to examine and report. It was terrible, yes, but she could bear it. “Why isn’t he a Decepticon?”

“Fixit has too much compassion in his spark to see indiscriminate slaughter as a solution to his problems.”

“Ah.” Kim nodded again. “Just to be, I mean, for the sake of clarity. It’s not okay for you to die. I mean, not okay with--with me.  You’re supposed to outlive me. By ten thousand years or so. I’m counting on that.”

“I, also, am quite fond of your company, and I wish our association to continue,” he said.

Kim swallowed hard. “Let’s—let’s get started? It seems like it’s been days since we did a proper interview.”

“Had we not already begun?”

“I think I’m not ready to dig out the truth of Fixit’s history just yet. It…it can wait a few days.  And I should probably ask him what he wants me to know about himself before I….Yeah. Let’s set that aside for a while.”

“Very well. I have been considering your comment about children’s subversive discourse.”

“Children’s—You’ve been considering scatological  humor?”

“Yes.”

“It occurred to me that the fascination and revulsion might both reflect difficulty comprehending the sheer number of microscopic creatures that inhabit human digestive tracts.”

“Like, they’re freaked out because there are so many gut bacteria?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.  Logical, but nope. It was a thing before we knew gut bacteria existed.  Before we knew any bacteria existed.”

“Oh.” His voice reflected mild disappointment. “Legions of life forms with whom I could not communicate inhabiting my body would certainly elicit ambivalence in me.”

Kim chuckled. “Oh, yeah. You’re not wrong about the ambivalence. It’s just not the cause.”

He nodded understandingly. “Then the only other explanation I can see is the food.”

He spoke as if the logic were obvious, but—thinking about food and thinking about excrement and _that_ explaining the humor—No. What? “What about the food?”

He tilted his head, scanning: not understanding what she could follow about what was clearly apparent to him. “Humans eat other organisms. I understand that this is normal and necessary, but to actually do it,” here his face softened sympathetically. “It must be very unsettling.”

“Hey! You said you didn’t mind humans eating!”

“I said I was not disturbed by watching you eat. It is not how the act is conducted that is troubling, only the physiological reality.”

“Oh. Because we eat other animals?” _Or because we don’t treat them humanely before we eat them or because we have domesticated/changed other species to oblige our convenience, or because we are overfishing food fish to extinction—oh, shit, am I going to have to become vegetarian?_

“And plants,” he agreed, oblivious to the conclusions she was wildly jumping to. “You build your own bodies completely out of the husks of what were—very recently—completely different creatures.”

“But—you recycle parts!”

“Yes. From other _mecha_.” He looked a little sheepish, as though what he was saying was obviously appalling and he was really sorry he’d brought it up to begin with.

Slowly, Kim dug in her bag for a granola bar and read out the ingredients: “’Oats, beet sugar, whole grain wheat…’ So I unwrap this and eat it and turn the oats and beets and wheat into me….and you’re wondering…what can it mean to be a person when I have all these oat and beet and wheat molecules inside me—no, not inside me, now pretending they are me?”

“You don’t?”

Well, actually….  “We do. Sort of. Mostly as a pointless philosophical exercise. I mean, when it’s all over we still have to eat. Science fiction speculated in the fifties—eating food in pill form, you know? Completely manufactured, no chewing even…. Didn’t work out. Turns out more processed is less healthy.” Kim looked out toward Jasper.  Rain clouds seemed to be gathering. Again. “Mecha are just themselves.  But humans are part of an ecosystem. We’re not isolated or independent or whatever. We rely on pond scum and trees to make oxygen—but not too much or there would be a real fire problem.  The bees pollinate the fruit trees and the roots of the fruit trees connect with fungus filaments to, maybe, use water properly or something.” Come to think of it, Kim wasn’t exactly sure how that worked. “And we eat the fruit, but so can other creatures. And we eat them.  And when we die, we rot and fertilize trees or fungus or something. That weirds us out, death and rotting. Some societies have customs to prevent that. Rotting.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, yeah, I admit it is weird and we’re not completely comfortable with it.  But if we don’t have the ecosystem, we starve. Or there’s no air. Or it gets too hot. So, you’re right. We’re not distinct from the other species.  And we don’t handle it well or even know how it works.” Kim stopped, stunned by the obvious.

After a while, Optimus said, “Energon is the gift of Primus.” He glanced at her sympathetically. “It forms in a planet’s crust.  Very few planets, and, except for Cybertron, only in very small amounts.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, the goal is  a good synthetic energon.  We can make a chemical substitute.  The process is very power intensive.  And the artificial energon leaves a waste product that must be cleared. And sometimes cannot be cleared properly and builds up to cause malfunctions.”

“Um…how do you clear the waste? Since you don’t…erm….?”

“It is compressed into very small cubes and ejected through a hatch.”

“Are there jokes about it?”

“…No? Maybe. If you’re bored enough you can make jokes about anything. It would be difficult. The topic is not funny.”

“Huh. You know. I have to keep eating.”

“Of course.” Then, “I have located a list of top-grossing movies with scatological humor.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“Would it be worth—”

“Probably not. I mean, there are so many better ways to spend time.”

“As you wish.” 

~TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Robots in Disguise is the most shockingly (possibly accidentally) dark kids show ever. 
> 
> *Early on, Fixit is told minicons are not permitted to leave their duty station. Right before they take him out of his duty station. But still. Rotten rule. 
> 
> *"Decepticon" is a criminal rather than a political status. 
> 
> * In ep 18 they enter a crashed ship on the ocean floor. In it are 50 or 100 minicons that look just like Fixit. It is not clear if they are security, maintenance, engineering or whatever. The episode ends with the bad guy pushing the self-destruct. Nobody says anything about the huge number of minicons that do not escape before the explosion. (I'm sure the writers forgot about them. The ep was clearly written very quickly and doesn't make sense in several ways. But that kinda doesn't matter. They died --in a show where nobody is allowed to die--and nobody cared).
> 
> So, yeah. Ugh. It's pretty gruesome. (Let's not get into the fascists that show up in season 3).


	5. Conversational Positioning

Chapter 8

_Memory:_

_They have to decide, for every event, what to remember, in how much detail, with which sensor records. Also how it is going to be filed.  Some filing can be idiosyncratic._

_Memories can also be shared—smaller files over wifi. Really elaborate/dense ones over hardline interface._

_~~~_

_Time and language:_

_Mecha think faster than humans. But maybe not as much faster as I think. I’ve heard them talk and seen them send messages, and yeah, I can’t keep up for more than a few seconds. But I think the real edge is the multi-tasking.  If they can have seven conversations going on at once, if Slipstream can monitor communications satellites and his cat and reality TV at the same time—_

_Ugh. Humans just can’t multitask properly._

_~~~_

_Energon:_

_It looks like they drink all their food. It’s not drinking. And it’s not food._

_There are three valves in the ‘mouth’ area: coolant, lubricant, and hydraulic fluid. If raw materials are needed by the body for minor repairs, a few sips of a raw materials suspension are held in the mouth (no, it really, really isn’t a mouth. I think it only looks like they talk with it) to be collected by repair nanites during shutdown._

_Energon is taken up by capillaries in the glossa. It is held in a temporary tank (size varies according to size of mech) and then circulated to power (minimally) spark chamber and protoform and (ideally) everything else, too. Well-refined energon leaves no waste. Systems powered by electricity generated from other fuels produce more errors, have more malfunctions. A protoform  and nanites run on electricity will quickly degrade and start to die. If two percent of the protomatter is dead, there is a automatic cut-off that shuts everything down and puts the mech in stasis lock._

_Energon is not food either. It is used metaphorically (symbolically) the way humans use metaphors of blood and air. _

_~~~_

_Spark:_

_I must be asking the questions about this wrong. Or they can’t translate it into English. Maybe I need to learn the Cybertronix words for this before I can make sense of it…_

_I can’t find out what it is or what it does.  They keep saying souls in English. I wonder what they think soul means.   I wonder if Nomura is right about it being an operating system. _

_How does it, in its magnetic bottle, interact with the rest of the mech? And I’m pretty sure mech state of mind (?! Or feelings or environment or something) interacts with it. How does that work? _

_It keeps bothering me that I won’t ever share a meal with them._

_I mean, sometimes Boston seemed like one Church pot luck after another. (Armenian potato salad. Corned beef.  The tres leches cake at the Sacred Heart bake sale. Samosas. Okay, I miss informants with tasty food.) Getting to know people is getting to know their food. And share meals, sitting at a table beside new friends._

_I’ll never cook for them. I’ll never eat with them. They don’t even_ have _recipes._

_What else can’t they understand?_

_***_

Hound—currently shaped as an FBI sedan--offered Kim a ride up to the helicopter pad to watch Springer’s full reformat. 

It was a completely slap-dash alt form. The seats were hard (good thing it was a short, slow trip). The console had no faked gages. The doors didn’t even have pretend handles on the inside. On the short journey to the helicopter pad on the mesa, Kim kept staring. Hound looked, sort of, like a car.  He might pass as a car, if the inspection came from someone who had only heard a description of what Earth transportation looked like.

“Do you ever carry cargo or passengers? I mean, normally?”

“Some capacity for cargo is usual, of course.  Although a high speed courier like Blur would have very little. “

There was quite a crowd on the mesa: Optimus and Ratchet, General Moreshower and Agent Fowler, fully half the mecha. In the shade of the solar panels, Captain Lennox was trying to be charming to Keller and Mearing.

“The archetype would have been here last night,” Hound said, transforming into his lanky, excessively jointed root form. “But apparently the HH-65 is a coastal search and rescue model.”

“Why choose it, then? Won’t it stand out?”

“The mass and engines were the closest fit,” Hound said, turning his back to her. “I’m told most humans won’t notice.”

“Oh,” Kim said. She wondered if he had turned to greet someone approaching. But he was facing north, away from the helicopter pad, the crowd, and the freight elevator. “Um. What about you? I assume you’ve picked an alt?”

“Jeep Wrangler.  For a society with such good roads, you have some remarkable engineering for all terrain locomotion.”

He was still facing away from her. Kim wondered if she had done something to offend him—but no, he was still chatting casually.  Did she have something in her teeth? “Can I ask you something?” Kim said to his back.

“Is this an indirect request to inquire about a delicate topic?”

He hadn’t even had the English language pack for five days. Damn, he was good. “Yes.”

“You may proceed.”

“Why aren’t you looking at me?”

“I am looking at you. I am observing you with the tertiary mid-range camera in my rear helm, both lateral wide-angle infrared sensors, and, as required when within twenty meters of a human, eleven percent of my electromagnetic perception is dedicated to precisely triangulating your position. Also, I am monitoring you with passive sonar.”

“Oh.” Kim blinked. “Oh.”  This should not be a surprise. _Of course_ not. She knew they didn’t just keep sensor arrays at the front of their faces. _Of course_ , just because he wasn’t facing her didn’t mean he was looking away from her.  It wasn’t like showing a facial expression to a conversational partner was even _natural_ for them. It was just a communications protocol that came with the human interface material—

She had seen that posture before. All the time. Mecha standing near each other, but not facing each other.  Just overlapping, she’d assumed. Or trying to be discrete about a conversation they would rather not involve humans in. Like spies in movies who leaned ‘casually’ against a column facing away from one another. But no. No.

“What are you looking at with your primary sensors?”

“I am not looking ‘at’ anything. I am performing a perimeter survey.”

“Right.” Of course. _Of course_. It was only her own thickness that had kept her from noticing. “Is it likely that hazards will get past the satnet monitoring?”

“No. The orbital system is well designed. In addition, the alarm system for unauthorized ground bridge activity has complete coverage with double redundancy. This location is acceptably secure.”

Kim nodded. “How did mecha stand for conversations before the war?”

“Interlocutors stood facing the same direction.”

Kim nodded again.

***

The HH 65 looked…big. Well, Springer was big. But he didn’t look that big. “Is he subspacing a lot of mass?” Kim asked.  Belatedly, she wondered if that was a rude question. She had never gotten a coherent conversation about subspace, and at this point she had to wonder if maybe she was missing some unexpected connotation.

Hound turned around to look more carefully at the landing helicopter. After a few moments he said, “Earth fliers have a very low mass to volume ratio. As it is, he will have to compensate for the small size of the rotors with antigravs.”

The preparation for the transcan—walking around the model, inspecting hinges and fasteners—was similar to what Kim had seen before. The actual transcan was not unusually long.  The reformat—

That was ghastly. Springer unfolded and unfolded and kept on unfolding. He seemed to turn inside out and splinter into too many bits.  The metal torqued and groaned and _squuk_ ed. The silver-black and holo swirl of protoform danced through the shuffle of moving metal.

Flashes of rainbow—was that repair nanites?

Coils of tubing.

Brightly colored—flowers? That bloomed and melted.

Kim found she’d been holding her breath too long and gasped.  And still Springer twisted and writhed in reformat, refolding now instead of unfolding.

Finally, _finally_ , there were two helicopters on the mesa. And then one of them tidily braided itself into a tall, light green, bi-pedal mech with a very human-looking face.

“That looked like it _hurt_ ,” Kim whispered. “Did it hurt?” 

Hound bent in half and stretched his ‘neck’ so they were at eye level. “A perfect reformat like that? No, it didn’t hurt. It only hurts if it goes wrong. When you do it right, it is…blissful.”

***

Kim followed Hound to his next appointment. It turned out that was a NEST briefing on the capabilities of the warship that was cloaked in (presumably) low Earth orbit.

Hound and Ironhide made the presentation together.  ‘Hide, down-home and direct (‘earthy,’ even, in his folksy demeanor) and Hound, slinkily over-jointed and shockingly alien, towered over the rows of tables and chairs and came within inches of the auditorium’s ceiling.  

The NEST guys, showing human adaptation at its finest, seemed completely unfazed by both the unearthly presentation and the terrifying content. They took notes on weapons emplacements, powerplants, ion engines…the importance of not letting the _Nemesis_ crash on an inhabited land mass because it would blow with the force of a twenty megaton bomb. 

Also, it must not be brought down over water, since the volume of energon it was probably carrying could poison seven hundred cubic kilometers of ocean.

Not that there was, at the moment, a weapon on earth capable of penetrating the _Nemesis’_ shields. Or a sensor capable of locating it in the first place.

***

There was a message in her inbox—Fixit requesting she meet him for lunch.  In a way it wasn’t particularly strange—the minicons were small enough to hang out in human country.

On the other hand, the last time she’d seen him, he’d been a sobbing mess in the infirmary. Was this going to be awkward?

Maybe Maggie would be there. That would help…

Maggie wasn’t. Fixit was sitting with Peshlakai from the logistics office. They were looking at pictures on Pesh’s phone. “The nieces?” Kim asked.

“Another last week. My brother’s first. Parenthood has made him traditional all of a sudden. He wants to take up sheep ranching.”

“Will that please the antecedent?” Fixit asked.

Peshlakai glanced at Kim. “My grandmother?” she said. “Oh, yes.”

Fixit nodded sagely. “Indeed.”

Peshlakai quickly banished her worried frown and stood up to clear her place. “I have a missing shipment to find.” She glanced at Fixit. “Yo.”

“Yo, Sammy.”

Kim set her tray on the other side of Fixit. “So, hey. What’s new?”

“I am making humans uncomfortable,” he said glumly. 

Kim blinked. He had never seen him emote so effectively. Always before, he’d seemed distracted, his responses in conversation swift and direct….and slightly ahead or behind the topic. “Well…you’re an alien nonbiological entity.  Some days, that is disconcerting.”

“No. I have worked with Sammy many times, on odd equipment requests. She is keeping a personal distance an average of seven point two centimeters wider. And she will not make eye contact.”

“Oh.”

“Also, Maggie is pretending to be very happy. She is not.”

“Uh, how can you tell she is not?”

“I am familiar with her electromagnetics.”

Kim looked at her salad, put down her utensils, sighed. “You know you are interacting differently, right? Different from last week?”

“Yes, my cognitive array is down 3 gigahertz, in addition to the missing sectors.”

Tentatively, she said, “People— _humans_ , think how a person interacts is how they…are. They think _you_ —your personality--has changed.”

“Interaction protocols are variable.  Adaptability to multiple—Oh. Humans often have a very limited array of interaction protocols encoded. Most of the humans here on the base speak only one language.  And many nonverbal cues are not under conscious control—Oh. I see.” He wilted noticeably.

“Fixit, before…were you running the whole English interaction application? I mean all the nonverbal parts?”

“No. It required a great deal of bandwidth.  And it did not integrate well at my processing speed.”

So, he was now running the full English nonverbal packet at the speed it was designed to be executed in. “You seem different,” Kim said. “Humans…don’t know if that reflects a real difference in your…personality. We think the way people communicate reflects the way they _are_.”

“The content of communications reveals the nature of the communicator, not the medium.  You seem so like us. I forget how alien you are.”

“Us too,” Kim said. She wiped suddenly damp palms across her jeans. “Listen. I’m going to _ask_ you—how much have you changed? What is different now?”

“I am the same. Everyone else has changed. You never used to ask me hard questions.” He sprouted a pair of antenna and scanned her pointedly.

After a moment’s consideration, Kim decided on the truth. “Fixit, I asked you hard questions all the time. You usually gave very useful answers. Sometimes, the answers were about some other topic…”

“This is…unlikely.” His voice had gone flat. She was upsetting him.

But--he needed an accurate picture of the situation. “Well, for example, one day I asked if you were busy and you said, ‘purple and green.’ Um.”

“I coded the subspace frequencies with metaphors of—hm. Perhaps my system was rather idiosyncratic.” His antenna drooped.

Quickly, Kim said, “And that was okay. I… _liked_ you the way you were. You were always kind, even when I had no idea what you were talking about. And—let’s be clear—I frequently don’t know what ‘Bots are talking about anyway.” Oooh. This was going badly. Lamely, she said, “Things are a little different now. But I think it is going to be okay.”

Fixit made a soft humming sound.

“So? How are things going for you? Are you on injury leave?”

“I have been temporarily assigned as a liaison to Agent Fowler. I will be working with humans. My size makes this convenient. And even if the bridge were functional, I could not be of use there.”

“I think that’s a great idea.  The way I work around mecha, you’ll be working around humans all day.  Like a scout, but with a perspective the other scouts never got.” Kim’s eyes narrowed. “We should find a way to disguise you—maybe as an Earth robot prototype—and take you places like, er, malls. And houses. Think of the perspective you could get!”

“I will not have this assignment forever,” he said.

“Right! So, you need to capitalize in this and get the firsthand data while you can.”

“Oh. Perhaps you are right. This is an opportunity.” He looked doubtful.  Kim patted him.  He’d know how to interpret that, he had the full protocols running.

***

The second round of transcans was scheduled for the afternoon. There was a crowd of humans and ‘Bots at the motorpool, lined up to watch the big moment.

Blur, when he examined the smart car, threw a hissy fit in in Cybertronix. Kim made a note to ask Slipstream for a transcript later. Ironhide and Jazz glanced at one another and took casual steps backward. Optimus waited patiently to one side, his arms folded, his gaze directed slightly away. 

When Blur seemed to have finished his tirade, Optimus gravely scanned the Smartcar and declared in English, “We are grateful for the sacrifice you have chosen to make in the interest of protecting our allies and preserving the survival of our species.” He said it so earnestly and respectfully…Kim folded her arms and stared at the tarmac so she wouldn’t smile. And then remembered that her mood could clearly be inferred by any mech familiar with human electromagnetics and sobered.

Blur’s transcan and reformat proceeded more graciously after that. His root form wasn’t undergoing major changes, so the process wasn’t as dramatic as Springer’s had been. Hound’s jeep was next. He came out of his vigorous reformat with a human-readable smile, high-fived Ironhide, and transformed into alt with a rainbow ripple of color. He then experimented with maroon and bright orange before settling on a dignified forest green.

Mirage had chosen a low-slung, Mazda sports car. The original had been candy-apple red.  Mirage came out such a gleaming black he was very nearly mirrored. Hound, who had settled beside Kim to watch, chuckled softly. “Yeah, _that’s_ subtle.”

As far as Kim could tell, Wheeljack wasn’t any subtler. He had chosen a Cadillac XT—a smallish, spaceship-looking SUV. Mostly white with red trim, he looked… Classy, actually.  Natural. Seeing him in  a parking lot Kim would think ‘frustrated banker’ not ‘disguised alien.’

When all the reformats were completed, there was a few minutes of chaos as the mecha got used to their new Earth bodies. Their root forms had changed as well.  All the joints were in the ‘right’—or at least ‘human’—place.  Hound’s neck was shorter. Wheeljack had less protruding bits on his armor.

At some signal Kim could not perceive everyone settled down, and the new arrivals dropped into alt. Some of the watching humans picked up duffel bags and walked over to join them.  Kim sidled up to June. “What’d I miss? What’s going on?”

“With the groundbridge out for the next couple of weeks, they are going back to doing patrols the hard way—the new guys are being taken out to explore the alien planet.”

“Oh. Damn.” She wasn’t going to get to _see_ that. What a thing to miss. They’d all be Earth acclimated by the time they got back. Kim quickly made note of the NEST guys—in civvies—who were loading equipment. She’d have to interview them when they got back.

More senior ‘Bots were taking positions beside the new guys now: Cliffjumper with Blur, Bulkhead with Wheeljack, Ironhide with Hound, and Strongarm with  Mirage. “How long will they be gone?” Kim asked.

June shrugged. “We’ll retrieve them from wherever they end up when we get the bridge on line.”

**Chapter 9**

It was hot—very hot—on the mesa. July in Nevada—ugh--although it had been raining only a couple of days before. Now there wasn’t even a breeze. Optimus lifted Kim and set her on one of the boulders. Stepping carefully and keeping the shadow of the rock between herself and the lowering sun, Kim eased around to a vantage point that took in Jasper.

“Is something wrong?” Optimus asked.

“I’m trying out mech body language.”

“Oh?”

“Conversational positioning.”

“Ah.”

“Took me over a month to get it,” she said.

“I prefer to speak to humans in mutual ventral placement.  Human facial expressions are valuable clues to state of mind.”

Kim glanced at him over her shoulder. “That’s not exactly fair, is it? You don’t use any paralanguage unless you want to.”

A short pause. “No.”

Kim turned back around. “It feels dismissive and impolite, not to face someone I’m talking to. I can’t just upload a new interaction profile and switch back and forth according to situation.”

Optimus folded his arms and looked distinctly patient.

“I suppose,” Kim continued after a moment, “that it is very convenient that you’re so accommodating.” She cleared her throat. “Usually, it is the ethnographer that has to adapt. I’ll be completely spoiled for human fieldsites.”

“What could tempt you back to human fieldsites once you’ve worked with genuine space creatures?” he asked.

Kim laughed. “Truth. But my contract is only for two years.”

“Your contract is for as long as you wish,” he said.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. Flustered, she brushed off a flatish spot on the rock and sat down. She dug for her notebook and pen. She took a deep breath. “Will you feel that way when I ask questions you don’t like?”

“I have promised not to be offended by requests for information.”

If he had been close enough, she would have patted his arm.  “Someday, I’m going to need answers to those religious questions you hate. Someday, I’m going to ask for your whole name and all  your titles in Cybertronix.”

“You have been very patient.”

“Will you—will you tell me why you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I’m not certain I understand your question.”

An evasion? Or did he not think of it that way? Should she relent? Would that be kind?

It wouldn’t: “Someday, _someone_ is going to say something. Something I notice. Religion is important, and people talk about…things. If you wait too long—whatever it is, however awful it is—Do you want to risk me hearing it from someone else?”

He tilted his head slightly, scanning. “Is that what you have concluded? That I am keeping a terrible secret from humans that will frighten or outrage you?”

“Actually, I don’t.” Kim stood back up, realized there was no room to pace, and leaned against the rock. “You’ve had scouts digging through the internet almost since it was invented.  You’ve got the whole human history on tap. You know about the Crusades and using religion to justify Indian Removal and slavery. You know what the Sambia do to their kids and Pharaonic circumcision and the Holocaust.  So, no. I don’t think that you think that I’m going to be shocked by anything.”

“A risky position to take.”

“Because I _might_ be wrong?  I think…probably the worst thing to come out will be that there were lot more disposable people. Mecha made like Fixit. But that is not going to shock me because there are humans right now who…who think other people are disposable. And treat them that way.”

“Suppose I were to tell you that my ‘religion’ requires the sacrifice of organic life?”

Kim—barely—managed not to laugh at that. “Yeah. Can’t judge you for that. We did it first.  The search term you want—just in case you missed it—is Mayan Empire.  But not the Carthaginians. That was just a nasty lie their enemies told….”

He considered, motionless and silent except for his fans. Then he said, “Suppose I were to tell you that we would not meet again in the afterlife.”

Kim wished she could scan him. Or something. Of all the things he might have said— “Are we speaking hypothetically?”

“Yes. Speaking hypothetically. Suppose I were to tell you that my spark and wisdom will be integrated into the Matrix upon my death.  Could we still be friends?”

“Why would I hold that against you?” Kim asked helplessly. She had thought she had been ready for this conversation. She had thought bracing for something horrible was enough.  Nope. That had been pure arrogance. She was baffled.

“It is a great comfort for humans in your culture to anticipate reunification with loved ones after death.  Knowing our relationship was transient--and that the grief of our parting would not be--would you still see friendship between us as a worthwhile undertaking.”

For a moment she couldn’t breathe for the astonishment. “I don’t—I don’t demand an _infinite_ commitment from people before—before deigning to make friends! Although I can see why—okay, one of the new bots came out and told me it wasn’t worth getting to know me because I’d be dead—” Kim stopped.  You did not repeat the contents of an interview to an informant’s boss. “I’m not making any bets about my afterlife anyway. I don’t claim to know. And no, eternity is not a deal breaker for me.”

Her phone beeped the arrival of two sympathy and one regret glyphs.  Why those? Why now?  Damn.

But this was not the moment to pursue the linguistics. “What about the others? When they die? The ones without a Matrix?”

“A spark without containment enters the planet’s magnetic field. If the planet has one. At home, on Cybertron….It was said that they were in the Hand of Primus, the Peace of Vector Sigma, Well-of-Souls. But Primus has long been silent. Some believed he had turned away from us even before the war. And with Vector Sigma silent as well….” He shrugged fluidly.

“Oh, my god! How are your people not freaking out? If they die here—”

“When spark is parted from memory and processor, the _individual_ no longer exists.  A persistent afterlife was never expected. The loss is not personal or frightening.”

Kim opened her mouth. Shut it. Took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry.”

“Earth’s magnetic field is…lovely. Forgive me. It is foolish to say so to someone who cannot perceive.”

“Does it…look to you, the way the aurora borealis looks to us?”

“No. But that is also beautiful.”

“Oh,” Kim breathed. “I apologize for bring any of this up.” 

“You misunderstand me. Or perhaps I have led you to believe my reasons are much less personal and petty than, in fact…I have mentioned that friends are more satisfying than palace staff. To be greeted by a friend who measures me by my actions is more welcome than to be venerated for a position I neither sought nor was nominated for.”

“You’re a fairly big deal,” Kim said softly.

“I am merely the keeper of a relic, a powerful tool that brings forth new life. It also carries the accumulated wisdom of all the Matrix Bearers before me.”

“Oh.” _Oooooh_. Kim tried to think. “Wait. Are we speaking metaphorically?”

“No. You have not seen the Matrix perform its function, but I hope someday, perhaps someday soon,  we will have the resources to bring forth a new generation and you will be able to witness spark quickening firsthand.”

“Oh. Um. No, I meant the other part. The wisdom part.”

“I do not understand.”

“Well, is it a symbol of wisdom. Or a practical…I mean does it…does it communicate that wisdom? Like, advice or information…um…?”

“Yes.”

“Wow,” Kim said. With a sinking feeling, she realized this was a bigger deal than she’d imagined, maybe as big a deal as she could imagine—and then, because everything lately turned out to be a surprise—probably an even _bigger_ deal than she could imagine. “I’m sorry I teased you.”

He sighed very patiently. “You are welcome to tease me about any other topic. You are welcome to tease me about this one, if you reach a point where you understand it.”

His voice was too flat. He was—She took a guess, “Why are you angry?”

“I am not angry. I anticipate losing—” His vocalizer reset. “I anticipate humans interpreting my position to be avatar of the divine. Your faiths are replete with examples. It would make a great deal of sense to you to frame my position that way. If this happens, Cybertronians may be cast as promoting a rival religion. It would end any hope of an enduring relationship between our species. And I do not think, Kim, that you could be friends with a god?”

For a moment, Kim couldn’t breathe. “But—you’re not! You’re not! You’re an archivist with a relic! You’re—you’re fertile! But that’s not—That’s—

“I am a general. I am a head of state. Your analogy to The Pope is somewhat applicable.”

“We just—we just have to present it, ah, low key. Or—you’re a very modern sort of leader. All those archaic titles, no, you don’t stand on ceremony. That’s old fashioned, inefficient, maybe.” Her voice was shaking. She closed her eyes. “Very inefficient.”

Optimus leaned down. She could feel a warm breeze from the vents beside his face. He would have been in conversational distance, if the proportions had been different. “Why are you afraid?”

“I haven’t figured out how to protect you. You’re right. Humans mustn’t _ever_ think…” opening her eyes, she stepped to the lip of the ledge and reached out. Lightly, slowly, she traced a finger along his chin. The metal plating was small and wonderfully smooth. The contact was comforting—but probably only to her. She dropped her hand. “We’ll figure it out.”

“We must not lie.  Truth is more persistent than gravity.”

“Is that a maxim?”

“A very humorous one, attributing intentionality to abstract ideas and physical forces.”

“Yes, I can see why that would be funny.” Unsure what else to say, she stepped closer.  “We have to tell the truth. Oh.” An idea, warm and familiar, slipped into place. “This is funny to me: old sociology, the parts of reality that are constructed.”

“I do not understand that statement.”

Kim smiled. This was an old theory, a perspective she not only understood (unlike so much these days) but had internalized so thoroughly that it was—for all its relativity—an absolute in her own belief system. “The Matrix is real, it’s a thing, it’s a fact. A truth we must not try to hide. But _Prime_ is a title. It’s a _label_. It isn’t a mechanical fact like the Matrix; it is a social fact, made real by belief in it, by performance of it, by the internalization of identity.”

“Yes. And it will be...difficult if humans were to misinterpret our beliefs and attitudes toward it.”

“Yeah, but see… _I_ don’t have to believe in it. There are all sorts of social constructions I only pay attention to because of convenience.  Money. Monarchy. Civil contracts. Marriage. All you can eat buffets. Prime is a title.  It isn’t any less ‘truth’ to think of you as ‘my boss who happens to have a very active spiritual life’ than to think of you as ‘an alien Pope’ or think of you as the mother of your species. Do you see?”

“If I am your boss, is it as real to think of me as your student and informant?”

“Oh, yes, that’s the most real. I chose to make you promises. I committed…. I owe you protections and honesty because I made those commitments.” Kim had to swallow.  Perhaps it was her own vocalizer resetting. “Harm to you would be real. And important.”

“Thank you.” And then, “There are so many concepts I do not know how to properly translate. That our frames of reference should be so different _and_ a hard line interface impossible… It is why a professional human interlocutor was sought.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You must.” He paused. “Tomorrow I will begin teaching you my titles and ritual functions. It will take several days.”

“It’s very complicated,” Kim agreed meekly.

“It will be complicated _for you_. Some of the terms simply do not translate. We will need to spend some time on glyphs and emic terms.”

“Oh.” Kim felt a wave of relief—her struggle with the linguistics was reassuringly familiar. This was something she could do. She flipped open the notebook. “Okay, if we’re getting into language…you experience both English and Cybertronix. What differences stand out to you.”

“English—All human languages I have on file—are very vague about pronouns.” Kim nodded, writing furiously. She knew how to do this part.

***

She spent the next several days studying the precursors to learning Cybertronix.

There was a lot to memorize—as one would expect. But the pressure was made worse by the fact that her teachers remembered everything they wished to remember instantly, with no special effort. “You can remember that I like WD 40 if I tell you so,” Windblade had said once, “but you cannot remember if I tell you this icon [abstract collection of straight and squiggly lines] means ‘I challenge you to a race?’”

So Kim studied every spare second, trying to cram the building blocks of mech communication into her mind.  There were six major paths that were used regularly (this did not include archaic forms and specialized codes): acoustic sound, radio amplitude modulation, radio frequency modulation, ansible transmission, word glyphics, and “alphabet spelling.” Fortunately for Kim, she could not be taught to use modes of communication she could not directly perceive, which eliminated three of the communications media right off.

Glyphs weren’t completely new.  Twenty or so basic terms had already sunk in through passive exposure. Although, since the use of glyphs on earth was usually confined to radio, it was unlikely that she would encounter them except with a phone app (which was accompanied by translation).

Glyphs, a linguistic relic of a much older and apparently very cumbersome communications system, had a limited vocabulary and only rudimentary grammar.  Spoken and written Cybertronix was much more complicated.

Despite their mechanical memories and excellent multitasking, Optimus, Jazz, and Fixit, who did most of the teaching, found the process almost as difficult as Kim. So much of the content and structure of their native language simply had no equivalent in English. This was what made the lessons necessary in the first place, but it also made it very difficult to teach.

There were 73 “letters” in the alphabet. Except the number system that they use for daily life (but not astronomy, which was base 15; some ground bridge calculations, which were base pi; and machine language, which was base 2) was base twelve. So seventy three became 61. Or _রে_ _כ._

Unlike English, each Cybertronix letter only corresponded to a single sound.  That was…one piece of good news, anyway. The rest of it? Not so much. Three of those sounds were outside the range of Kim’s hearing. Five more could not be distinguished as unique phonemes.

Optimus, upon learning this, immediately projected spectrographs of the sounds and began to patiently point out the specific frequency differences. It took a moment for Kim to realize he was serious. She explained that before humans learned to talk their brains started ignoring the details of meaningless sounds in order to focus on the phonemes relevant to their own native language. “I’m not saying I won’t eventually get it, but it is going to take a lot of practice and repetition. I just can’t hear the difference between _diing_ and _diing_.”

“But—neither of those sounds was correct!” he sputtered.

“And neither of those sounds are the kind of sound my brain is designed to recognize as words.”

“Your brain wasn’t designed.”

Kim lifted a finger triumphantly. “That’s right.” Struck suddenly by a wave of affection, she patted his ankle. “My brain is a puddle of goo. The fact that it can distinguish any sounds and associate some of them with meanings is a miracle.”

He took half a step back, crouched further down, and cupped a hand behind her. “Kim, some degree of failure in this endeavor is inevitable. And I have never believed your mastery of Cybertronic communications to be necessary for the overall success of the project. But I am concerned by the possibility that the attempt will exceed your operational parameters in a way that might cause you harm.”

“I can’t imagine _how_ it would.  But that would be the thing—something I am not able to imagine.  There may be some parts…I can’t do. I mean, besides make most of the actual phonemes with my voice. I’ll stop, if I have to.  Or if I need more time…we can take more time….”

“If you cannot imagine a deleterious effect, how will you recognize it?” he asked gently.

Kim blinked. Scrap. She had not thought of that. “Look, you scan me all the time.  If I was in trouble, you’d know.”

“Kim, your physiology and electromagnetics are patterned, but not completely predictable. Humans are difficult to understand.” 

“Well—but-- I’m just learning to identify sounds.  That is hard, but not dangerous.”

“….You are likely correct.”

“And Maggie does bridge math.”

“She does. But she does not attempt to form sentences in a non-human language.”

“I’m not even close to that either, yet. And I’ll stop, if I have to.”

Jazz confronted Kim’s struggle to distinguish meaningful sounds by taking her on long drives through the desert cranking out music and poetry. He would sing a song in Cybertronix himself and then play recorded versions of others singing it. Tiny variations in how a sound was made were permitted, although, at first, Kim could not hear them. She could tell the songs were not quite identical, though she would not have guessed different artists were performing. The vocal range of  mecha varied much less than for humans.

On these long rides—on the dirt roads past the firing range—Jazz said very little in English: mainly, “Relax. Just listen. Stop worrying so much.” On Friday (probably, Kim had sort of lost track of the days) he asked, “Which one is your favorite?” They left the road and were driving slowly down a dry creek bed. It was so hot the air shimmered above the rocks like a desert in the movies.

“You didn’t tell me the names of any of them,” Kim answered.

“Hum it.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ve analyzed twenty thousand hours of human music. I know how humans parse melody. Hum your favorite. I’ve got the samples to extrapolate.”

It was a song Jazz had sung every day, heavily rhythmic, with a strange chord that seemed to be the chorus.

“It’s a poem,” Jazz said after listening for a moment. “The poetic form is a series of riddles. This one points out the absurdity of expecting order in the universe.”

“Oh. Is it, like, comedy or philosophy?”

“Both. Kinda.” His frame shifted as though he were shrugging. Or they might be driving over a rock. “It’s a commentary on subatomic physics.”

“Can you translate it?”

“Almost none of it.  You will have to learn it in Cybertronix.  We will begin on Monday.”

It was definitely Friday then.

They turned back toward the mesa. Kim had a lunch appointment with Fixit and Maggie in the DFAC. Maggie, with the bridge shut down and no more repairs to do until the last few parts had been fabricated, spent a couple hours every day explaining math to Kim.  Fixit joined them during Fowler’s lunch breaks. Over the last few years he’d spent a lot of time explaining numbers to humans.

Today he arrived looking much tidier than usual.  Several of his dents had been removed and all the scratches and scuffs in his nanite coat were gone. In fact, he looked bright and glossy. “Wow,” Kim said. “Looking good.”

Instead of preening, Fixit sighed as he pulled up to the table and sank forward and down to lean against the bench in an approximation of sitting. “Tomorrow we are going to Meadows Mall,” he said glumly. “I must look like a _new_ robot.”

Kim glanced at Maggie, who was paying attention to her salad. “Um. Are you worried about the trip?”

Fowler had jumped delightedly at the chance to get a mech representative into a natural human habitat. Kim was getting email updates on the project three or four times a day. Now she wondered if his enthusiasm had overwhelmed Fixit.

“I am not worried.  Maggie will be there with you and Bill.”

“He’s bummed about the paint job,” Maggie said.

Kim patted his arm. Gently, so she wouldn’t leave a smudge. “It looks _really good_.”

“I would rather be noticed for my usefulness and demeanor rather than my appearance.”

Kim managed—barely—not to gape openly.  Modesty, in the appearance sense, was not a mech virtue. “Um,” She said. “You know, I had a roommate, back when I was an undergrad. She felt the same way—she wanted to focus on her work, not her looks. Um. She wore oxfords and kakis every day.”

 “You are going to be noticed tomorrow,” Maggie said gently. “We need to make sure you are noticed as a plausible prototype, not a wreck that hasn’t had a bath in three thousand years. Robot in _disguise_.”

Fixit didn’t answer.

Kim said, “If you don’t want to do this, I’ll put a stop to it right now. I’ll call it off.”

“No. This is a very good opportunity. The other minicons do not move like Earth machines.  They could not pass. And I admit, I am curious.”

Kim would have offered again, but just then Mr. Keller and a small entourage of frowning men in suits arrived for lunch.  To Kim’s surprise, Keller paused at their table and greeted Maggie like an old friend. He exchanged a high-five with Fixit and paused offer Kim a polite, “Dr. Montgomery, nice to see you again,” before continuing on to the lunch line.

Before Kim could ask what that was about, Fixit projected a simple equation onto the table. It was simple in that it only had four symbols.  From a human perspective it was still horribly complex because Autobots did not write equations in a way Kim recognized as linear.  The position of the figures dictated some of the operations.

The afternoon she spent with a training app Bumblebee had made. It played a Cybertronic sound and displayed three characters. Kim had to tap the correct one. Her success rate was 56%. She reminded herself that she was pairing seventy three abstract shapes with seventy three random noises.  Learning the Russian alphabet had been nearly as bad at first. If she were to take on Sanskrit or Arabic right now she would be trying to do this without such a nice app….

She felt bad about missing so many of Ratchet’s lessons. But she wasn’t ever planning to work in mech first aid.  And the hiatus wouldn’t be forever. She wasn’t going to study Cybertronix too seriously—just enough to have the alphabet so she could handle words that wouldn’t translate properly….

Five-thirty came, but the daily meeting on the mesa had been pushed back two hours because Optimus was in a meeting with Keller. Kim, her mind a tangle of strange sounds and alien music, walked the long way through the base and had a second meal in the DFAC.

Although the bridge station was shut down and empty (waiting for replacement parts), everywhere else seemed busier than usual evenings.  Things had changed with the arrival of the new mecha. Or, rather, the Decepticon warship. Everyone was busier. Several people had stayed late at the little cubical farm beside the greenhouse. A second catwalk had been erected in the cavernous central hall and Jazz was standing at it, looking over the side to read a computer screen over the NEST tech’s shoulder.

~tbc


	6. Hedge

**Chapter 10**

She was standing at the edge of the mesa trying to catch a breeze when she heard the freight elevator. 

Optimus wended his way through the forest of solar panels with slow steps. His shadow stretched out long and thin and arrived first.

“I’m here,” Kim called.

“Good evening,” he answered. He stepped into the open and slowly pleated down into alt. His driver’s side door swung open in invitation.

Kim patted his hood as she passed. “You seem tired,” she said, climbing in.

“It has been a long day,” he conceded. “Mr. Keller is understandably upset about our inability to locate the _Nemesis_. He has been trying to reassure our allies. It is difficult when there are so many unknowns.  As it is, we will need to end our meeting early. I have a call scheduled with the Australian prime minister.”

Kim frowned. “When are you powering down? Are you getting enough rest?”

“I am scheduled for recharge between one-thirty and four this morning.”

Kim winced. “That’s not long enough to defrag.”

“It will not cause me harm to make do for a few _orn_.”

Kim scooted to the front of the seat, cupped her hands loosely around the hula dancer and made the most earnest eye contact she could manage. “Okay. Listen. This project is important, but it’s not urgent. And you don’t have to supervise this personally. You should be using this time to rest.”

“Kim. A field language lexicon is not required for your primary research. You are putting forth this great effort as a personal favor to me. I will support you in this task.”

 _Woah_. “Okay. Yes, I am doing this for personal reasons, for—for you. I am. And, yeah, it will help my work. But. That does _not_ mean you owe me pushing yourself to exhaustion. Or whatever. Things are…complicated and difficult right now. I get that. And it’s okay. I promise.”

“You misunderstand. I do not choose to participate in the language lessons out of duty. For me it is—the English lexicon is suggesting ‘rest.’ But that is not the right word.”

Kim patted the hula girl. “Give me the right word.”

He iterated a fluid string of sounds.

“Again.”

He repeated the word. Kim pulled out her not book and drew five characters on the page. _< -> _어 θ Ш 도  She held it up to the hula girl, angling the page into the last of the sunlight.

“Well done. That is almost correct. This one on the end.”  ی appeared on the dash screen.

Kim adjusted her transcription and smiled. “What does the word mean?”

“It means to bring a discordant spark back to a resonant wave form.”

Surprised, Kim looked up.  “Wait—this is _fun_ for you? I…don’t think so. No. I’m _so_ slow. This has to be so frustrating, watching me slog through, not getting it, over and over….” Kim had to look away from the hula girl. This was too much.

“Yes, over and over. Patiently, persistently, you struggle with a task that exceeds your normal operation. Because you wish to better communicate with me. I have spent today with angry and panicking representatives from many squabbling governments. I have dodged their attempts to manipulate me for their own purposes. I have soothed their fears, coddled their egos, played their games. I will do it again tomorrow. But right now—I am here, sharing your effort to understand my language. It greatly eases my spark.”

“Oh,” Kim said in a small voice. _No pressure._

“That ripple in your field—is it fear? Surely not despair?”

“Optimus, I’m going to fail. I can’t hear all the sounds, I can’t _make_ the ones I can hear, the mathematical equations seem to go in circles, even Bee can’t explain the grammar, my god, you should be working with that child, Raf, not wasting your time with me. I’ll never be able to say your name—”

“Kim.”

“And this is important to you, and all you are asking me to do is try, and look, _I’m not doing that_ , I’m freaking out—” Stupid. Weak. Too emotional about this. He was already under so much pressure, Optimus did not need drama on the mesa as well, not when this was the place he came for a break—

“Do you remember the first day? The first time we met on the mesa? You promised me that this process would be difficult. You warned me that our relationship would be painful. Do you remember?”

Kim scraped the back of her hand over her burning eyes and laughed once. “Yes, my lump of goo can remember back a couple of months.”

“At the time…you accepted the daunting task before us.”

“I’m not giving up,” she said contritely. “I’m not sorry I came.”

“You said there would be days when you hated me.”

Kim took a shaky breath. “Weirdly, that hasn’t happened yet. I love you every day. Heh. We’ve barely started though: give it time.”

“It does not bother me, my friend, that you cannot say my name. But I would like you to hear it and know what it means.”

Kim straightened her notebook and groped around for a pen. “Let’s give it a go.”

“I should explain how naming works. When a spark successfully inserts into a supporting structure—usually a ball of protomatter—it is given a designation. Often, this is a number. For your people, to be designated by a number alone is considered ‘dehumanizing.’ It is not so for us.  Numbers can be quite symbolic or aesthetically evocative. Different base systems fall in and out of fashion.  Or there are other systems: a cohort might all be named for atomic weights, or cities, or art styles, or the lyrics of a popular poem.”

Kim nodded, scribbling all of this down as fast as she could.

“My cohort was named for stellar quadrants as viewed from Cybertron.”

“Um, I don’t—what?”

“Hm. Segments of the night sky. Directions of navigation in stellar cartography.”

“So…you were all named for a direction? Or a particular star?”

“Mecha are as obsessively pattern-seeking as humans. The stellar quadrants are identified by prominent constellations.”

That, somehow, surprised her. They had constellations. For a moment, she tried to imagine what they might be constellations of? And were any of them as absurd as the horse-with-a-fish-tail one or the bear with the inaccurate tail? “So—hey! Can you see them from Earth? The stars?”

“You can see some of the stars from Earth, yes, but the perspective is different. The constellations we knew on Cybertron are not coherent viewed from here.”

The sun was down, and a few stars were already showing. Kim leaned forward in the seat, peering up through the windshield. “Where?”

“They will not rise until early tomorrow morning. They are in the constellation Orion.”

Disappointed, Kim sank back into the seat. “Rats. Okay. What is the word?”

He said it slowly and then spelled it out on the screen. Kim copied the characters down and then, with a warm feeling of satisfaction, circled them. “This isn’t the name the others call you,” she said.

“No. It is usual for an individual to name themselves. My second name is З **손** **.** It means a gesture of earnest reconciliation.”

“Um, like, ‘forgiveness?’”

“Think…more mutual. In some media examples, I have seen the custom of young boys initiate the ritual ‘pax.’” 

 _Oh. Fairly old media. Well. Not from the perspective of someone thousands of years old._   And then Kim’s breath caught as that thought evaporated in the shock of the next one. “Well, fuck,” she muttered.

“You dislike my name?”

“You named yourself for making peace, and they made you a general!”

“Ah.”

“How are you not completely crazy?” Kim shut her mouth. She had already said too much. This was just so fucked up--

“I was not made a general.” He paused. “I did not seek out the Matrix, but I accepted it and the accompanying responsibilities willingly. Your outrage on my behalf is misplaced.”

Kim opened her mouth, closed it, found the glyph for _I sorrow with you_ in the app. Sent it.

“Thank you.”

Kim realized the hand that wasn’t holding her phone had curled into a fist. She firmly uncurled it and ran her fingers over the dash.  There was nothing she could say to him, but she must not pull away. He paid very close attention to human gestures. _God, poor Optimus._

“Are you able to continue?”

“Uh. Yeah. As long as you have time.”

“There are a number of positions you would translate as ‘general.’ This is the one that reflects my responsibility:” What he said next was long, complex, and unusually harmonic.

“Oooh.” Kim swallowed hard and made herself pick up the pen and paper. “You’re going to have to spell that….”

He spelled it out and then said it again. Kim tried to burn the sounds into her memory. This was a hard one.

“At the moment, I think the best translation is ‘defense coordinator.’ Without the context of our military structure, to go into more detail would muddy the concept.”

“Okay. What’s next? I remember the glyph for Prime.” She drew the complex shape on the page, the name he had given her at the job interview….

“It is enough for today, I think.  We can begin the religious titles another time. Some of them are rather obscure.”

Kim sighed. Apologetically she said,  “I won’t be making much progress tomorrow. We’re taking Fixit to the mall….”

“I am aware.  I think the change will do you good. And the operation has great potential for data collection. It is a shame I am not small enough to go myself.”

Oh, yes.  That would have been nice. “I would love to take you into human spaces, show you homes and churches and museums. Hm. Getting Fixit into a _church_ , that is going to take some creativity…..”

“No doubt you and Agent Fowler will  think of a solution.”

***

Maggie, with her hair in a pony tail and a “HR Prison: Australia” tee shirt, looked like a grad student.  Carly had a tee shirt that said, “Truckee Meadows Community College” and a clipboard. Kim thought the clipboard was a fantastic touch. Epps—a bodyguard, just in case--was in a math tee shirt (normal curve versus paranormal curve). Kim had not spent enough time with math or engineering instructors to gauge whether he was believable or not, but Carly was satisfied.

Fixit was emblazoned with stickers that proudly declared he was the Mayhem 7, property of the Northern Nevada Community College Consortium.  He turned in a circle so that Kim could see that he’d added a red racing stripe. “You look wonderful. I’d never guess you weren’t a local,” Kim said.

Fowler was in a denim jacket covered in patches.  And cowboy boots. And his wallet was attached to his belt by a looping chain. Kim blinked.  She’d been told he would be ‘on the outside,’ traveling down to Las Vegas on one of Arcee’s alts. She had not expected him to look so weirdly like an actual biker.

Chromia was in alt, waiting to transport the rest of the party. Fixit gracefully popped himself into her truck bed, and Arcee and Maggie tucked a tarp around him. Well, this was it, then.

Kim sat squeezed between Carly and the passenger-side door, and even though she hadn’t gotten up particularly early, she very quickly fell asleep and slept her way down rt. 93. As Chromia slid gently into a parking spot—a good parking spot, they were fairly early—Kim blinked as the nervousness she had been firmly ignoring surged. She was taking Fixit into a mall, exposing him to the human masses….

 _It will be fine. They’ll love him._ No one was going to guess he was an alien. He wouldn’t be unsafe. _No one will know._

Maggie had a huge ‘remote control’ cobbled together from bits of video game controllers and spare parts from the bridge overhaul. She stood beside the open tailgate, fiddling earnestly with the controls while Fixit—awkwardly, jerkily, methodically—climbed down out of the truck bed. Fowler, studiously ignoring them, had already parked and was walking in the main entrance. “Show time,” Carly whispered.

Kim took a deep breath and turned on her headset.

There was a flower show going on at the mall. Fixit quickly stifled his happy (audible) chirp when he saw it. Kim was reminded, poignantly, of the first morning, when the minicons had proudly shown off the little greenhouse on base. Fixit had had even less opportunity to see Earth foliage than the other two. Grinning, Maggie fiddled with the remote and followed him.

Mostly it was orchids, but a little ‘English garden’ with a short but picturesque path had been built around the central fountain and there was a section to the side where irises were (somehow) competing. Fixit, his antennae the highest Kim had yet seen, slowly rolled past the display, naming species over the radio. Carly walked in front of him, holding a light-up ball labeled ‘navigation aid.’

There weren’t many people at the mall yet, and mostly they were paying attention to the flowers, but slowly they began to notice the little technical party.  One after another they stared.  A woman in a blazer and name-tag was watching them distinctly nervously. Kim smiled and waved at her.  Epps, who seemed to have a great grasp of the whole ‘stern, engineering professor’ vibe, took out a tablet computer and began to record Fixit’s progress.

 _Business as usual_ , Kim thought.    _This is just a normal research project. People are looking because it’s cool._ And yes, just then a little kid—preschooler, probably—came up to Maggie and said, “Can I meet your robot?”

“Sure thing, mate. If you’re careful, you can even give him a high five.”

If seeing the flowers had been exciting, the child was some kind of transcendent experience. Kim had to turn down the volume on her earpiece: “Oh! It looks just like a regular human, except smaller! Is this what cute means? Look at its little ears! And it talks!”

Epps had to look away for several seconds to conceal his laughter.

 _Yes!_ Kim thought.

*******

When they turned off the main road, Fixit pushed aside the tarp and looked out. He raised one servo and waved through the back window. Kim waved back.

It was a relief to enter the tunnel.  This could have been a disaster. The scope of things that could have gone wrong….

If their cover had been blown. If Fixit had found the mass of strange humans frightening.  If mall security had started asking questions. If Fixit had fallen down an escalator. IF….

Nothing had gone wrong. Kim eased her shoulders back and down and took a deep breath as they turned into the tunnel. They had made it. Fixit was fine, happy and proud. Maggie wasn’t frowning worriedly.

A good day.

Jazz and Optimus were talking by the balcony. They turned immediately when the mall goers arrived.  Jazz helpfully gathered up the tarp as Chromia lowered her tailgate so Fixit could hop down.

“So?” Jazz asked. “What are the humans really like?”

“Hey,” Carly said, sliding out of Chromia’s passenger door. “We’re humans. Right here!”

Fixit gave her a prim look. “Humans are both less snarky and less whimsical than situation comedies have led us to believe,” he announced.  “They are also much friendlier than reality programming had indicated. I would like to have more observations.”

Optimus leaned down. “I am looking forward to your detailed account of this one.”

Fixit’s optics reset. “Oh. Of course. I will have my report on the server by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Take the time you need. And if it is convenient, I would be pleased to accept the files directly.”

“Oh.” Fixit glanced at Maggie and then rose up perhaps half an inch taller on his wheels. “I will get to work on that. Thank you.” He zipped away at twice his usual speed.

“Well?” Jazz said. “I’m headin’ over to human country. Maggie? Bobbie? Need a ride?”

As the Jazz pulled away toward the main tunnel, Chromia  and Arcee peeled away toward the ‘Bot commissary. Kim wondered what they would say about today. But she had not been invited. And, anyway, she was tired. She waved good-bye, checked her bag, and headed up the stairs.

Optimus stepped into the angle between the steps and the balcony. “Are you pleased with the experiment?”

“We pulled it off.  They thought he was adorable.”  She reached the small landing and leaned against the rail. “I still can’t think how we’ll get him into a church. Maybe as a test run of a personal assistant for the elderly?”

“If the Decepticons reveal themselves, this, at least will be the ‘silver lining.’ We will be able to interact with humans as ourselves.”

“I’d like…a little more time.”

“As would I.”

Kim glanced up the stairs. She was tired. And needed a shower. “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, then?” she asked, stepping backwards.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you for a favor.”

Kim stopped. “Oh. Of course. Anything.”

“Ratchet has decided to manually re-seat my left lateral fan.”

“Your--? Oh. Good. I’m glad. I hadn’t wanted to ask….” Her smile felt forced. It had been weeks since this fan had worked properly.

“Although medical privacy _per se_ is not a concern, on the unlikely chance a sensitive issue should arise, we have decided not to include the trainees”

Kim nodded. “I won’t mention it then.”

“The trainees do not work on Sunday, but I have meetings scheduled continuously until twenty-two hundred tomorrow. Ratchet has scheduled the procedure for twenty-two-fifteen.”

 No meeting tomorrow evening on the mesa, then.  But then, there sometimes wasn’t on Sundays. “Okay,” she said.

“Normally, Ironhide would accompany me, but tomorrow night he and Hound will be in Galveston.”

Kim opened her mouth, shut it. Scrap.  This conversation—like so many conversations with mecha—had lateral arabesqued from straightforward to completely opaque without warning. “Oh. I’ve never been to Galveston. I hear it’s on the coast,” she said experimentally.

Optimus nodded once, waiting patiently. Or possibly expectantly.

“I’m missing something,” Kim said.

“This exchange is somewhat formulaic. If you are occupied tomorrow night—or if you are *not* in fact occupied but wish to avoid accompanying me—it is polite to offer pre-existing plans as an excuse.”

Kim’s eyes widened. “Oh! The trainees are excluded, but not me! I didn’t—thank you. That’s very generous.”

“You misunderstand, I think. I am not offering you an observation for your research. Or…In fact, I suppose I _am_ offering a research opportunity; not as a passive observer but as a firsthand participant.”

“I have even less preparation than the trainees!” she protested, horrified at the idea of—what? Assisting Ratchet? With minor surgery? Shit!

“Perhaps I should begin with a more comprehensive explanation.”

Kim nodded.

“It is usual, when undergoing minor medical procures during which the patient is on-line, for a friend or trusted acquaintance to…ah…come along for company. To provide a distraction if the procedure is tedious. Or reassurance, if the patient is nervous.”

The light dawned. “OH! So when Arcee came with Cliffjumper to get his mold cleaned out—I thought she was just there because she had to strongarm him into coming. But she was—she was actually _with_ him.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh.”

“You have performed this function before, although casually and without specific invitation.”

Yes. Kim had. More than once she had chatted with the patient while Ratchet walked the trainees through the weirdness of Cybertronic mechanics. “Oh.”

“It is an ordinary interaction for us. It would be useful to your research to participate more deeply. Since the opportunity has arisen…will you do me this favor and accompany me tomorrow night?”

“Are you sure about this? I mean, I know it seems like half the base is gone, but…there has to be somebody still here who is better prepared—better able to be useful to you? Surely?”

He nodded. “Yes. Jazz or Chromia would be acceptable.  Springer is only a few hours away, his flight plan could be altered—But I do not think the situation will require someone ‘well prepared.’ It is a minor procedure.”

“But this is—” Kim stopped, took a deep breath, lowered her voice. “This is a medical procedure.  A _real_ medical procedure. Surely you don’t need—don’t need fake help!”

“You are afraid you are insufficient to the task?”

“I am afraid I am insufficient to the task and _will cause you harm_.”

“You did not harm Jazz or Blur or Hound.”

Kim couldn’t argue with that, but she couldn’t quite agree with it either. Somehow this was different.

“I am asking you to trust me. I am asking you to learn something important—and to let me help you learn it.”

“You’re using your own medical appointment for a research experience! The priorities are backward. The important thing is having it go well!”

“It is _my_ medical appointment. Surely the ‘priorities’ are mine to set.” 

“Do you want me there?”

“I have said so.”

“No, you said it would be a good research opportunity. It isn’t the same.” 

“Is it your place, as an ethnographer, to judge your informant’s priorities? I have stated my preference. I have made a request. Have you decided my reasons are not good enough?”

Too torn to answer, Kim dropped her eyes

Optimus’ voice went flat. “Very well. If the experience would distress you, it would be best to refuse.  It is  polite to claim a prior commitment. However, this can be delicate because an easily verifiable lie gives offence—”

“Yes,” Kim whispered. “I’m sorry. If you’ll still have me, yes.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your flexibility.”

Kim winced. _I’m fucking this up so badly._ “So, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“The appointment will not appear on the official schedule. You may need to write it down.”

Kim forced herself to smile at that little ‘Bot chauvinism. “My brain’s not that bad. Believe me, I won’t forget this.”

“I did not intend offense.”

“I’m not offended.”

He considered her for a long moment. “Good night.”

“Good night.”  She did not wait for him to withdraw, but gathered up her bag and retreated up the stairs.

~TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~ Don't worry Catc: Raf will show up.


	7. Immersion

**Chapter 11**

“You’re back,” Ratchet said when she appeared at the yellow line. “I wondered if you’d forgotten the location.”

Kim took that as an invitation and crossed over the line. “I’ve been studying Cybertronix. Well, the alphabet. It’s kicking my butt.”

“I’d heard. You are the first to go beyond mathematical symbols. It…speaks well of you to make the effort.”

Kim froze, gaping up at him.  Had Ratchet ever said anything nice to her before?  “Thank you,” she gulped.

“Do not be disheartened when you fail. The attempt is a meaningful gesture. Our grammar is simply too complex for your brains.”

Kim laughed. “Ew! Harsh. There’s the Ratchet I know.”

“Hmph.”

“So, anyway, I’m here because—”

“I was informed,” he said shortly, turning back to the equipment he was arranging on a table.

“Do you, uh, disapprove?”

In the explaining voice he used with trainees, he answered, “This is a personal matter between the two of you. As a physician, I have no opinion.”

Oh. Scrap. “Um, what about as, well, you’re my teacher sort of. Even if I’m not a trainee. Do you have an opinion from that perspective?”

His hands stilled, and he shifted to look down at her again. “You have observed—and even participated in—much more difficult and invasive procedures than this. It is possible you will learn nothing new.”

Not, precisely, the sort of answer she had been looking for.  “As his friend?” she tried.

Ratchet tilted his head, scanning in puzzlement. “If you are asking if I think he has taken this whole ‘we need to treat the humans as community members instead of generic organics and build personal relationships with some of them’ too far…no. I suppose I don’t. He’s right. We have no where else to go.”

That had been completely unexpected, but Kim covered her surprise. “Oh. Thank you.”  This grudging approval was not reassuring.  In fact, it made her feel a little worse.  Optimus was using his own medical appointment for research _and_ as an example of community relations. What he actually might need in the way of moral support or whatever seemed not to figure at all.

“Hmph. He’s going to be late. There is a kerfuffle in Turkmenistan. He sends his apologies.”

“Oh. Okay.” Kim looked around for a place to sit. She could work on notes.

She had barely seemed to have gotten settled before Optimus exited the tunnel. “I apologize for keeping you waiting,” he said.

Ratchet waved a hand and grunted absently at him. Kim frowned and said, “This isn’t late. Not even three minutes.” Kim glanced at her phone to make sure. “By human standards, you’re on time.”

Otimus nodded. “Thank you. But I am uncertain…are you following the politeness form that requires minimizing an offense to spare the feelings of the offender? Or is ‘three minutes’ within the range for which you are casual about time?”

Kim smiled. “I am casual about time to the ten minute point. At nine and a half minutes, you’re late. Well, people who are not dealing with international emergencies in Kazakhstan are late.”

“Turkmenistan. A commercial aircraft had strayed from its flight plan and was misidentified as a UFO.”

“Oh.”

“If you two are finished, I’d like to get started before the local star turns into a red giant….”

“The humans are corrupting you,” Optimus said cheerfully. “You used to despise hyperbole.”

“Hmf.”

Optimus sat down on the medical berth.

“Where do you want me?” Kim asked, approaching from the side. “Am I on the shelf?”

Optimus stilled. After a moment he said, “I apologize. I should have prepared a briefing packet for you.  I assumed…. It seems this is an activity I take too much for granted.” He glanced at Ratchet and then back at Kim “I did not consider….”

“Hm,” Kim said. “If you are trying to tell me you’ve just changed your mind--”

“I have not. It is possible that your help will be needed later.  In fact, is likely to be required. This minor repair is an excellent training opportunity. I wish to continue.”

“Okay. Where do you want me?”

“She’d be best on the instrument table,” Ratchet said, leaning down to offer a hand. Kim climbed on for the ride.

The ‘instruments’ were long and snaky. Ratchet wouldn’t hold them in his hands, but attach (merge?) them with his servos.  They were long because they would go deep. Which, okay, yes, was better than disassembling the patient to reach an inner part.  But. Ew.

One of them had a small circular saw on the end.

“Kim?” Optimus said softly. “You pay attention to me, not to what Ratchet is doing. This is not any sort of mechanics lesson.”

“Right. Yes. I’m supposed to talk to you.”  The memory of talking to Hound in the camouflage pavilion at the crash site rose up from her memory.  She pushed the thought aside. “I’m supposed to…just chat. Hang out. Be distracting.”

“We are social, Kim. And Ratchet will be busy enough without being distracted by conversation with me. You understand?” He lowered himself down flat on the berth, which, in turn, shifted to offer support to his irregular (and not at all pliable) shape.

“What would Ironhide talk to you about? If he were here?”

The outer shell of his torso armor split down the middle and retracted. Kim forced herself not to look.

“Ironhide usually does an after-action analysis of my most recent combat mistakes.” He had turned his head towards her. They were just about at mutual eye level. He smiled slightly.

“That doesn’t sound like fun.” Kim tried to smile reassuringly back.

“No. But it is distracting.”

“Ever so entertaining for me,” Ratchet put in. He had selected two of the longest instruments and integrated them into his servos at the joint. “Ironhide always picks the most embarrassing mistakes.”

“Embarrassment,” Kim gasped, playing it up. “You? No, I don’t believe it.”

“There is a saying in English. ‘Captive audience.’ Minor maintenance is an excellent opportunity for—” Optimus broke off, flinching. His optics reset.

“Hold still,” Ratchet grunted.

“The perfect opportunity for captive students,” Optimus said, his tone mild.

“Huh,” Kim said. “So. Tell me something embarrassing?”

“You draw the character 로 with too much curve. The lines are straight.”

Kim laughed. “Cute. But seriously. Tell me something embarrassing about _you_.”

“When I calculated my orbital insertion for our arrival on Earth, I was off by one point three centimeters.”

“Ooooh. How will you ever live it down?”

“I attempted a course correction.” His optics reset again. His vocalizer made a soft, aborted, grunt.

“How? I thought you all came in ballistic.”

“It did not succeed. I not only landed outside my seven-mile target area but actually within Jazz’s target area.”

“Scrap.”

“Indeed. This sort of sloppiness is very dangerous. The chances of collision are low, even with a bad landing. Even so.” He sighed.

“I think…when we bring a space craft down it has a much larger target area than that. And we would never try to bring down two at once, let alone five.”

Ratchet snorted. “You were supposed to laugh,” he said.

“Why? Was it funny?”

“It was very funny,” Ratchet said. His voice was louder than usual and much more cheerful. Kim snuck a look over. His hands were buried forearm deep in Optimus’ chest.  “There is an entire genre of jokes with a punchline of an off-target ballistic re-entry.”

“Wow. I can’t imagine being that cavalier about space travel. I can’t think about any jokes we make about it.”

“There is one,” Optimus said. “I saw it on a meme. ‘There are two kinds of countries in the world. Those that use the metric system and those that have been to the— _ah_ —moon.”

Ratchet _tickety-beeped_ angrily. “I’m going to have to replace the bracket,” he said in a hard voice. “There is oxidation.”  One of his arms withdrew and dropped an eight-bladed fan the size of Kim’s palm on the table beside her.

 _Oxidation_. Rust. The bracket had rusted.

Ratchet changed a servo for the bladed tool.

Kim cleared her throat. “I assume I keep talking.”

“No,” Ratchet said tightly. “You are going to wait until I’m finished talking.”

“Ratchet,” Optimus said placatingly. “I am looking at the file you sent. It is a very small lesion.”

“Yes. Yes it is. And since this is a pit-spawned, mudball of a planet with an absurd amount of atmospheric oxygen, I am tempted to just blame it on the unhealthy environment. Nevertheless. What is your current fuel mix?”

The tiny, luminous lenses that made up Optimus’ optics shivered and relaxed as he moved his attention to a more internal focus.

“No,” Ratchet snapped. “I will not take this conversation to radio. You wanted to train a human in our customs. Well. Here we are. I suppose we are about to find out if it was a bad idea.”

“Ratchet,” Kim said quickly, hoping to at least derail this quarrel even if she couldn’t do anything about the rust spot, “he has a right to privacy.  If he doesn’t want me to know—”

“Yes, thank you. I am aware of your priorities. You have mentioned them enough. But this—this _prissy_ separation is not our way. If all you have to offer is mere physical presence, you might as well not have come at all.”

“You are angry at me,” Optimus said gently. “Do not transfer it to her. The murky atmosphere is not her fault.”

“If she withdraws now, her uselessness will be entirely her fault.”

That was just unfair. There had never been any chance she would be useful here.

“Three-point-seven-four-one to one,” Optimus said.

Instead of answering, Ratchet slapped a tool onto the table and exchanged it for another before plunging both arms back into the open chassis.

“Am I supposed to be talking?” Kim asked miserably.

Optimus rearranged his faceplates into a thin approximation of a smile. “Not yet. Ratchet isn’t done haranguing me.”

“Haranguing you? Why would I bother with that?” He dropped a twisted and orange-spotted bit of metal the size of Kim’s last pinky joint onto the table. “My records show your consumption ratio to be three-point-five to one.  But, of course, I am prone to mistakes.” He turned away and stalked over to one of the enormous cabinets that lined the back wall under the observation shelf.

There was a four foot gap between the table Kim was siting on and Optimus’ head. She leaned as far across it as she could and whispered, “How can I help?”

“I can’t think of anything that would help at this point,” he said wryly.

“What would Ironhide do?”

A sigh. “Fold his arms and look disapproving.”

“And don’t think for a minute that I won’t tell him,” Ratchet called over his shoulder. “Of all the stupid, careless, irresponsible—” he trailed off to a Cybertronix grumble too quick and quiet for Kim to identify the phonemes.

Kim leaned over and picked up the little, rusted-out bracket.  It was still warm along the edge from being cut. One side was rough with flakes of orange. “How worried should I be?”

“Don’t ask _him_ ,” Ratchet said briskly.  He was returning to the table with a handful of scrap metal. “I’ll decide that after I analyze his error files and systems tests.  You can transmit those as soon as they’re compiled, by the way. My Prime.” The chunks of metal clattered against the table as he sorted through them.  Selecting one, he began to trim it with a tiny dremel. Kim had never had such a good view of a fabrication before.  Each movement was quick and precise, the metal carving away as though it were soap or chalk.

Well. That was not why she was here. Kim slithered down from the table onto the metal struts of the medical berth. “Be careful,” Optimus said.

Kim did not point out that she wasn’t carrying a fifty year old vacuum cleaner this time. Stepping slowly, she eased up past his face to his helm and leaned against the solid curve of his armor. “Can you still—not see me—but—?”

“In that position, my passive sonar is receiving a very detailed image of your internal…motions.”

“I’m sloshing?”

“And pattering.  It is…an interesting spectrum of data.”

“I can move.”

“This is fine.”

Carefully, Kim laid the flat of her palm against the temple ridge that marked a seam cover. The metal was hard, shallowly etched with an abstract pattern  and slightly warmer than room temperature.  “Is everybody shorting themselves on energon?” she asked softly.

“They had better not be,” Ratchet said. “Our Prime, in his wisdom, has forbidden it.”

Kim realized she was starting to sweat and withdrew her hand. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Oh, no. Do go on.  It was a stroke of genius to have you here. Ironhide would be yelling by now. With no impact whatsoever.”

“Ask your question,” Optimus said heavily.

“How much energon is there, exactly?”

It was Ratchet who answered. “At our current consumption, there is enough six hundred and forty-three local days.”

Kim took a deep breath. “And you’re finding more?  Faster than you’re…consuming it?”

“At the moment,” Optimus said. “But the population here on earth could grow again at any time.  We have no reliable supply lines. And if we engage in regular combat—as it seems inevitable that we will—much more will be needed for repairs.” He paused. “Blur and Cliffjumper are investigating an anomalous reading in Tennessee. It may be a large energon deposit.”

Or it may not. Kim closed her eyes, folded her arms, and leaned back against the curve of his helm.  And then had to shift slightly, because a sensor finial was poking her shoulder.

Ratchet had finished machining the replacement bracket and had leaned over to peer into the open chassis. He reeled out a medical cable and snapped into Optimus’ wrist.

Was she still supposed to be talking? She hoped not. Surely, nothing she said would be helpful at this point. Her eyes popped open. “Wait a minute. Ratchet’s mad. Ironhide would be mad. Am _I_ supposed to be mad right now?”

“Aren’t you?” Ratchet said. Both his hands were extended into Optimus’ internals again.

“No! No… I don’t know enough to be angry. I don’t know what it is like to be on a strange planet or  afraid of watching your people starve. I don’t know what it is like to be at war for thousands of years. I don’t know if—if not eating or whatever we call this—is a symptom of depression, or if mecha even _get_ eating disorders.” Kim stared glumly downward.  Between the supports of the berth, she could see the floor more than ten feet below.

“I am not glitching,” Optimus said. His intonation was completely flat.

Ratchet’s voice was openly biting. “That is true enough. His risk assessment is set too high, but since he does that on purpose, no, we can’t call it a glitch.”

“My risk assessments are not set higher than Ironhide’s.”

Ratchet emitted a series of resonant clicks, one after the other in a sharp staccato.  In Kim’s mind she saw the character that went with the distinctive sound. ЬЬЬЬЬЬ Without thinking, she rounded her tongue and popped it down in six fast clicks.

Utter silence followed. Ratchet froze, his optics on Kim rather than his patient. Optimus’ fans abruptly notched up to high.

“Does she know what that means?” Ratchet asked quietly.

“I can’t imagine she did. I think I will have to explain it _now_.”

“I don’t know how you _would_ translate that.” He resumed working. There was a soft clank deep inside Optimus’ chassis. “’Defective clock-work mechanism?’ It doesn’t have any emotional connotations in English. Hm.”

“There was a media serial that used the insult ‘dipstick,’ in a way that expressed similar vehemence and contempt with a mechanical flavor. But that does not convey the profanity,” Optimus offered thoughtfully.

“’Moronic son of a bitch,’” Ratchet said. “That would have the right sentiment. Or, perhaps, ‘dumbass.’ Don’t they have any insults that aren’t biologically based?” He retrieved the fan and began to carefully ease it back through the interior machinery.

“Very few. ‘Jerk’ lacks emotional punch.”

Kim buried her face in her hands.

“Kim,” Optimus said softly. “I do not have brain chemistry. I am not subject to those sorts of dysfunctions. Fuel proportions are calculated with a margin of error. It is possible I…extended into mine too far.”

Ratchet sighed. “Bring that fan on line now. Let’s see how it does….Pause, let me…all right try again.” Ratchet nodded. “That will do. All right, I need to visually inspect a couple of other places. Hold still.”

Kim turned to the side, so she could see what Ratchet was doing, but kept her hips and waist in contact with the helm. Her body heat had made a warm spot. Was that a meaningful reminder of her presence? Was it even noticeable, for a mech?  “What is he doing?”

“My systems analysis has three locations flagged as ‘insufficient data.’  Ratchet is examining them manually to make sure there is no other oxidation.”

“I said that,” Ratchet grumbled, “Retract your—thank you.”

Kim opened her mouth to say _almost done, then. It will all be over soon,_ but remembered in time that the ambiguities of English meant that phrase could be interpreted as a death threat. “Faith in your strength,” she whispered instead.

“We aren’t past the berating stage of things,” Ratchet corrected her.

“I am,” Kim whispered. “I _so_ am.”

“Well, if she’s going to be all sappy about it, you might as well have asked Bee or Windblade to keep you company. At least they’d have the grace to do it on a private radio channel.”

“Ignore Ratchet’s comment,” Optimus said. “He is tired of worrying. Or perhaps it is better to say, ‘tired from worrying.’ He does his best for us. It is certainly not his fault there is never enough energon, never enough new parts, never enough time between engagements.”

Ratchet _tickety-beep_ ed at him. It was not a sound Kim could approximate.

Optimus sighed. “My friend, I _am_ sorry. I simply cannot resign myself to our species dying out.”

“We do not have a future without _you_.”

“I disagree. I am no less replaceable than anyone else.”

Ratchet withdrew his hands from Optimus’ torso. Some of the tools transformed back into his servos, others dropped off onto the table with a clang. “We’re finished. You will report once an _orn_ until further notice, so I can check your consumption ratios and run a system’s check. If we are very lucky, there is no permanent harm done.” He turned on his heel and stalked off toward the external tunnel.

“Where’s he going.”

“For a drive.” His outer armor unfolded and snapped back into place. “I have disappointed him.”

Kim stepped to the side, reaching out to brace herself against the table. She sighed. “No. I think he knows why you did it.”

Optimus sat up. “Perhaps you, as well?”

“Maybe,” she said sadly.

“Maybe you are disappointed?”

“No.” Kim groaned. “It’s all just tragic. I’m…grieving for all of you. You’ve come so far, suffered so _much_. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but maybe we’ll all be dead next week, so, _no_ , I’m not going to waste my time being disappointed in you, when even after all this, you still haven’t given up. And that’s…” She stopped abruptly and snapped her teeth together.

“Ah,” he said after a moment. “I... appreciate your choice to be kind.”  

Kim wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. There was only a little moisture. “So. What now?”

“Now, I must power down for seven hours for a repair cycle. You, also, should go to bed.”

“I should—If I were Ironhide, I’d be staying with you now, right?”

“That is not practical. But the gesture would not be substantive in any case. I will not be aware of external surroundings.” He looked carefully regretful “I have had to rearrange my schedule to accommodate the longer rest cycle.  I will not be able to meet with you tomorrow night.”

Right. Because the Nemesis was still here. And that was more important than having a part rust out. “I understand. Do what you need to do. Ah. Can you give me a lift to the balcony?”

“My pleasure.” He lifted her gently, pausing over the table to collect her bag.  His long strides made a short trip of the curving path to the assembly room. Kim spent the trip wishing she could think of something comforting or at least distracting to say.

*** 

She had slept hard and woke without remembering any dreams. A retreat-sleep then, hiding from—

_Aw. Damn. Optimus._

She had screwed that up so badly. She was going to have to apologize.

How in the world could she apologize?

She made herself do morning things: take the trip upstairs to the shower, get dressed, jell her hair, put in the earrings she had the mods for, eat something.

She made herself remember every awful thing that had come up in Boston. Immigrants had it hard. She had been to funerals. She had watched a divorce. She had gone along to doctor’s appointments because poor people got more attention when there was an anthropologist taking notes on their ‘access to care.’ She had borrowed a car to take an elderly informant shopping and listened to her story about how she got mercury poisoning and what it had done to her health.

This was the job.

Well, no. Writing down the details of the Prime’s health problems was decidedly _not_ the job. There must be no record. Weakness at the top wasn’t something they could risk getting out. Not with the humans already freaked out by the enemy warship in orbit.

At that thought, Kim tossed the rest of her breakfast in the trash and went out to the balcony early. She was set to meet Jazz in a few minutes anyway—

He was already there. He straightened from his very casual lean against the stone wall and practically skipped over.  “Ready to get started?”

Kim managed a smile. “I start learning comic existential poetry today, right?”

“Actually, change of plan.” He twisted, spun, and dropped into his alt. “Bee thinks you should do some listening to natural conversations. He’s got a point. The poetic forms—highly stylized. We’re going to meet him and Arcee in town for some conversation.”

“Oh. Okay.” _In town? What did Bee have in mind?_ Then she remembered what Bee always had in mind. It was a surprise that Jazz did not take her to Raf’s house.

He pulled up beside Bee in the parking lot of the somethingMart between the army base and town and opened his glove box. “Take the headset—it’s set up for personal use. NEST isn’t linked in.”

Raf was waiting by the doors. He was also wearing a snazzy military-grade headset. “Isn’t this cool? Bee says I can keep it.”

“It is cool,” Kim agreed automatically. “What are we going to do with it?”

“You’re going to go shopping,” Arcee’s voice said in her ear. “I got curious about what humans do in their little buildings after watching Fixit’s feed from the mall. Take out your phone. We’ll tap into the camera.”

Kim turned back around.  Arcee was not parked beside Jazz and Bumblebee, but spread out into three different parking spots. Kim thought about waving. Decided it would be weird, and didn’t. Her phone in one hand, she collected a cart and headed into the department store.

“Are you going to shop?” Raf asked.

“More authentic this way. Besides, I need tissues.”

 _Sh-Click, resonant click, rising oooo sound, short trill. Squeel like R2D2 dropped off a roof. Ping!_  Sounded in her headset.

“Where _what_ people are, Bee? I see plenty of people?” Raf replied.

Kim stopped walking and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the individual sounds of Cybertronix dancing past her ears.

“No, that only happens in advertisements,” Raf said. “Nobody is going to jump out and argue with us about what we’re buying.”

Kim missed all of the next statement.

“Jazz wants to know why we’ve stopped,” Raf reported.

Obediently, Kim started walking again. “How can you tell who’s talking?”

“When talking over the radio, the first word is always a designation,” Raf answered. “Show her…..See that was Bee….That was Jazz….That was Arcee.  I think they don’t use tags like this over the radio usually though.”

“No, Radio code is completely different,” Kim said. “Is it weird, guys? Talking in words but to our headsets?”

It was Bee who answered. “He says it’s slow,” Raf translated.

They went through the store like that, the three Autobots looking around and asking questions in Cybertronix, and Raf translating for Kim.  For the sake of thoroughness, Kim wound through the personal care isles, pet food, home décor (where all three mecha were intrigued by fluffy towels and shiny mirrors), automotive (where Kim dumped a selection of waxes and tar-remover into the cart), toys (where there were lots of questions and repeated requests for close-ups with the camera), clothing (where Jazz and Bee pointed out every sequined and embroidered shirt until Kim gave in and selected three, and Arcee asked a bunch of questions about socks), jewelry (where Kim picked out a mechanical watch, much to the amusement of the mecha) and, food. There was a lot of commentary about food. Sometimes Raf translated it and sometimes he just answered in English.

Before they left, Kim detoured back into personal care.  Mostly ignoring the mech kibitzing (Bee kept urging vampire red and Jazz was fond of purple) she picked out two shades of blue hair dye and a bleaching kit to lighten a streak, so the color would take more brightly.

It was the most fun Kim had had in—forever, it seemed like.  Listening and hanging out—much easier than asking sensitive questions or trying to think of distracting things to say while a friend had exploratory surgery  on his insides—

No. She wouldn’t think about that. Today had been pleasant and useful. It would make future research much easier—

She fell asleep on the short trip back to base. Jazz didn’t mention it.

***

She barely had time to unload the groceries before hurrying to her lunch math lesson in the DFAC.  Fixit was waiting, but he was alone. “Where’s Maggie?” Kim asked, setting down her notebook and tray.

“She has gone to Maryland. It will be over a week before we can use the bridge.”

Kim frowned. “A vacation?” She realized she knew very little about Maggie’s life off the base.

“The NSA has a listening post there. They are looking for Decepticon activity in human electronic communications networks.  She has many colleagues and old friends there.” His servos opened and closed restlessly, and his antennae drooped. “She will return Friday.”

Kim winced. “Are you worried about her traveling?”

“No.” One of his antenna twitched in her direction. “Should I?”

“Not that I know of. Um. I guess you miss her.”

He glanced at Kim, then away.

“I’m sure she misses you too. But she’ll be home soon. And you’ll see her.” Fixit was staring at the salad bar. “Um.”

Fixit continued to stare past her for several seconds. “She will come home. And I will see her. But she will not…she will still be missing me. Because I will still not be the same.”

“Oh….”

“I have changed. I have tried to find a way to justify returning to my previous cognitive configuration. But I see no rationale for refusing the upgrades. So I will change _again_.”

“Wait, no!” Kim shoved her plate out of the way and leaned toward him. “Why would Maggie--? I’m sure Maggie doesn’t want you to go back. You had a really hard time and it was dangerous and she was really worried.”

He nodded. “But Maggie loved me as I was. She said so. And she is sad now.”

“Not about that!” Oh, damn.

“You have said you yourself are unsure of the extent or nature of my change.”

Had she said that? Kim felt slightly sick to her stomach. “She loved you before, and you’ve changed so maybe she doesn’t love you now? Is that the idea? And all your human friends?”

He nodded.

“Your…mech friends?”

A shrug. “Parts fail. Parts get replaced. We do not…get worked up about it.”

Kim took a deep breath.  “Sometimes humans have trouble with change. Particularly if it’s sudden. But—we don’t expect people to _never_ change.”

He glanced at Kim and then away. “Biological organisms do not change their parts.”

“Uh. Well, no. Not our parts. But we _change_. Do-do you know how old Maggie is?”

“She is twenty-five.”

“So, twenty-five years ago she was a baby.  You have to have that on file. Right? Babies. And then she changed. Really fast, when you think about it….”

His antennae were pointing straight out. “Twenty-five years is not long.  And in twenty-five more years--?”

Kim nodded. “Humans change all the time. We don’t expect people—our friends—not to change. It’s okay for you to change.”

“Maggie will be old!”

Kim blinked. “Well, yes.” If she was lucky. That was perhaps not the right thing to say. Kim was miserably  aware that this was not the direction she had been trying to steer the conversation.

Fixit’s servos snapped open and shut several times.

This was not going well. “Fixit, Maggie isn’t upset because you’re different. She’s upset because you were hurt, and you haven’t been repaired yet, and she doesn’t know what to do, and there isn’t anything she can do to help!”

“Change is horrible.”

Kim had occasionally thought so.  Now was surely not the time to mention it. “No. Maggie hated it when you were overclocking. It was dangerous, and she was worried. She wants you to be okay. That’s what we…that’s what we want for our friends. To be okay.”’

 Fixit scanned her doubtfully. “Are you sure?”

“I am. You’re right that she’s upset. She’s upset about your—your injury. You suffered. You’re still not, ah, comfortable.  It’s hard when your friends are hurting.”

Fixit was silent for a long moment. “English uses the same words for physical pain and emotional suffering.”

“Well…yes. I think we process both with some of the same parts of the brain.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

He was silent for a long time. Kim wondered if that was a good thing.

“For humans sadness is emotional damage. I am sad. Maggie is sad.”

Maggie had seen him wailing in despair. Kim decided not to go there. “What do you call emotional pain?

“Ьचθร่งШ _< ->_ن.” He had to spell it out. “In English we say ‘distress.’ Physical pain is not processed with emotions, but with errors.”

“You need to be having this talk with Maggie.”

“That will be hard.”

“I don’t think so. Maggie is your friend. Just tell her everything.”

“I would like to talk about math now.”

Kim glanced at her cooling lunch and shrugged. She pulled the notebook over. “You said there were special characters for indicating variables in an equation. Humans just use letters of the alphabet.”

“Yes. That startled me at first, using letters for such a different purpose. It seemed both barbaric and surreal.”

“How do you feel about it now?”

“I can see the efficiency of using existing characters instead of creating new ones.”

Kim got the disappointing feeling that different kinds of variables would each have their own unique characters. “Okay then.”

***

Fixit’s break only lasted as long as Fowler’s lunch, so the math lesson was never too long.  Kim returned to her room afterwards to study. So many shapes and sounds to match.  Bee’s app was a huge help.

Actually—this wasn’t as bad as learning Russian had been. There were no grades here—no smudgy papers with Ds on them. And no verb tenses yet. No verbs ever, maybe. It was doubtful Kim would ever assemble a sentence in Cybertronix.

When she was thoroughly tired of trying to hear the difference between resonant _ping_ and flat _ping_ , Kim got out her computer and sat down to work on organizing fieldnotes and…

Found herself unable to spell?

When she looked up the page was a sea of red misspelling underlines.  Experimentally, Kim pulled up the report she was polishing over Fixit’s trip to the mall. Reading words she had written two days before seemed weird and wrong.

The section on the flower show looked awkward, but the only fixes she could think of were in Spanish or Russian.

Sweating, she snapped the computer shut and stood up to pace. This wasn’t unexpected, she told herself. She’d had friends in the field working in a second language that talked about their reading or writing being hopelessly gummed up for—

How long? Kim couldn’t remember. Days. Weeks?

_It’s part of the process. It’s inconvenient. And unpleasant. But my work will be better in the end._

She hadn’t lost the ability to write by hand yet. And she could still talk.

_This is perfectly normal._

***

She read her handwritten fieldnotes into the voice-to-text until her voice got tired. It wasn’t traditional, but it was _marvelously_ , wonderfully liberating.  She’d bought all the fancy software she could when she’d gotten her field computers—but she hadn’t thought to use it like this.  She’d expected to use the transcription features for interviews.

Despite the misery of culture (language?) shock, the wonders of technology put her in a cheerful mood. Kim was happy when she wandered down the hall to visit with Max and Slipstream. 

Slipstream, inspired by Kim’s venture into alien languages, was trying to teach Max to ‘sit,’ ‘stay,’ and ‘come’ to Cybertronix commands. Preening, Slipstream showed off proudly. Max had already mastered ‘come.’ Probably that was due to the very expensive treats Slipstream was using.

“So far, she does not perceive my words as language. Perhaps a behavioral cue? I am interested to find out if she can be taught to recognize that I am speaking, not merely emitting noises.”

“How do you know what Max is thinking?”

He produced a small coil from thin air. “This is a remote sensor.  Max will only wear it when she is sleepy. Organic brains emit complex electrical activity. There is much more patterned activity when I speak English than Cybertronix or produce random sounds.”

“Oh. That’s. Very organized.”

“Yes.” He considered the coil. “Organic brains learn some things much slower than processing arrays. But I suspect there are some things organic brains can learn that processing arrays cannot learn at all.”

Kim looked at the coil, too.  Her brain probably had more in common with Max’s than with Slipstream’s. But Slipstream could speak to her in English about cat cognition. And Max would never be able to. “I wonder what would happen if we put the sensor on me,” she said.

“I am not sure I have the technical and xenology skills to expand the project. I will consult.”

 _Okay, then. I guess._ She wondered if she should ask who he would consult with—and immediately worried that it might be best not to seem too enthusiastic until she knew more about it. “Speaking of projects, uh, how’s orbit?”

“Seventeen communications satellites have been contaminated and must be cleaned. That will have to wait until the ground bridge is functional. In the meantime, we have predicted the next likely target and have prepared a trap. If it goes as we hope, sometime within the next thirty-six hours the Decepticon spy will lose navigation capability. It will not have time to transform for atmospheric insertion upon loss of orbital velocity.”

Kim gulped. “He’ll crash.” 

“Probably not,” Slipstream corrected. “He will burn up in the atmosphere first.” 

Kim winced. “Nice.”

“I cannot take the credit. Master Drift and Jazz crafted the virus.”

***

_Anthropologists are not supposed to be cheering on a war. I’m not supposed to be happy some unnamed person is going to burn up on reentry. _

_Am I happy? Maybe I should be happier than I am. They invaded our planet. They intend to strip-mine it. All of it. They’d slaughter us like rats or mosquitos, but we’re armed. Nukes would mess up the magnetic field.  Thank god for the arms race. _

_An anthropologist should certainly not be thinking that. And I’m not ever, ever supposed to think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ _

_A Decepticon killed on reentry is one more Jazz and Drift won’t have to fight in person. Or Optimus. Or Ironhide. Or Hound.  These individuals or some others. That’s the trade._

_And this whole planet and seven billion people._

_And I sort of get why the Decepticons are fighting.  Fixit was built to be disposable. He’s hard to repair because no one ever intended to bother with repairing him. Use him up and throw him away.  Megatron. He was a disposable person._

_But we didn’t do anything to them. When does vengeance go too far? At what point will rage at the universe stop?_

_One more dead by day after tomorrow. And I have to figure out how to be okay with that, because I do believe it is okay to defend ourselves and all the life on this planet._

**Chapter 12**

Tuesday, the interview on the mesa was canceled again. Well. There were other things on her schedule to worry about.  (She would worry about Optimus anyway, but she could pretend she wouldn’t.)

The day started  with another trip to town. This time Jazz and Kim met Bumblebee and Raf in a dry drainage culvert behind a strip mall to race radio controlled cars. Kim, with no experience, kept oversteering and barely missing the concrete walls. Bee thought this was very funny. The near-crashes were greeted with a fragment of ‘Oops, I Did It Again’ and a _zhooop click_ that Kim soon found embarrassing. Then Jazz nudged Bee’s bumper at an opportune moment, and Bee crashed his little racecar into an obstacle. Kim yelled “Shzwoop click,” at him, which made Raf laugh so hard he actually flipped his little car.

On the way back, Kim got a text that Fowler was skipping lunch, so the math lesson with Fixit was cancelled. Kim felt a completely unprofessional surge of delight.  Despite crashing early the night before, she was exhausted. She fell asleep almost before she made it to bed.

She woke sometime after six in the evening and stumbled to her fridge in search of food. The previous day’s trip to the store had yielded tabbouleh, avocados, fresh tomatoes, nice wheat crackers, and black bean dip. Did they go together? It probably didn’t matter. Kim fixed a plate, grabbed a bottle of cold tea, popped a spoon in her back pocket, and took the elevator up to the mesa.

It was hot and still and very quiet outside. Not even the wind was moving. Kim was no longer shocked by the heat and open space of Nevada, but she still noticed it.  Would it ever feel like home?

Had Boston felt like home? Hoboken had. And Salem. And Albany. Of course, if Nevada became ‘home,’ would it be the desert she adopted? Or vast warren of the secret base.  What had Jazz said the first day? Everyone loves a secret base—

Her foot skidded on the dust as she cleared the solar farm and realized the boulder pile on the edge of the mesa was already occupied. Optimus, motionless but gleaming in the slanted sunlight. Z _hooop click._ Kim took a step back. If he was taking the calls up here he would be busy—

Her phone vibrated a text. Kim tucked her tea bottle under one arm and checked. MY APPOLOGIES. I THOUGHT I HAD ENTERED OUR CANCELLATION INTO THE CALANDER. 

Kim’s thumb hovered. The explanation was simple. She should send an apology and gracefully retreat—

The letters on the key board seemed to float.

IS SOMETHING WRONG?

Kim swallowed and said aloud, “No. Sorry. I just can’t spell today. I’m fine. I was just coming up to eat.  I’ll  get out of the way now.” _Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt._

The glyph for _hold position_ flashed onto the screen.

Well. Darn.

And—did that mean don’t move _at all_? Or just don’t leave?

Well. Darn.

Kim looked around.  Her folding chair was tucked up under the solar panel at the end of the row.  Kim had missed lunch and usually ate dinner earlier than this. She retrieved the chair and sat down to eat, hoping the movement did not constitute a distraction.

The crackers and dip didn’t come out evenly, so Kim was scraping up the last of her supper with a spoon when Optimus suddenly rose and covered the distance between them in three steps. Kim tried to wave him off. “It’s okay. I don’t need anything. I just came up to eat.” She lifted the empty plate before remembering that he was put off by the way humans continually incorporated other life forms into their bodies. She sighed and set the plate and spoon under the chair.

“Did you need to see me?” he asked, leaning down.

“No. Really. Just came up to eat. Don’t let me interrupt.” She started to rise. “I’m done—”

He tilted his head upwards for a scan. “What did you mean when you said you were unable to spell?”

Kim blushed. “It’s nothing. Really. I am just…rewiring my brain with all the new symbols and distinguishing new sounds.  It’ll pass.”

He sank down into a crouch. All the way down. His chin was nearly touching the ground, which put them more or less at eye-level. “Kim, you do not have wires,” he said slowly. “Are your cognition or communication systems impaired?”

Kim goggled. “No, I am _not_ having—” _Was_ she having problems with cognition? Kim replayed what she had said. “It’s a metaphor. My neurons have tiny connections. Those connections make my skills and memories. I’m making a lot of new ones fast. About communication, but I suspect it’s chaos everywhere in there. At the moment, I’m fine if I write by hand, but English text on digital things…I mean, I can still _read_. I just.…”

“We are pushing you too hard.”

She made a face. “I don’t think so. This bit is uncomfortable, but once I get the sounds, I should go back to normal. I’m not going to try to build vocabulary or grammar at this pace.  Collecting words will just be a normal part of research.”

“I am not certain you should attempt grammar.”

Right. Because who knew if a human brain could do that? “We’re a long way from deciding. It isn’t really part of my job. I mean, what I have to do—I can do without it. And there isn’t time, really. There’s so much else….  It’s just a few more days. It’s weird, but I’m fine.”

He nodded after a moment, his chin clearing the stone ground by only a few inches. “As you say.”

“It’s all right. You can go back to work. I didn’t mean to interrupt—”

“In fact, I have twenty-three minutes until the next scheduled conference call. There is time for informal conversation.”

“Oh.” Kim relaxed into the chair. “That’s great. How are you?”

“You are not initiating a greeting ritual?”

“No.” Kim glanced at her phone. There was a glyph for this, but finding it in the app seemed an insurmountable task. “I’m asking for a status report.”

“Ratchet has found no evidence of malfunction in my self-repair systems or protoform. He will continue to monitor me regularly for the next several months, but the outlook is good.”

Kim leaned forward and rested her arms on her knees. “I’m really glad. I appreciate your telling me.”

“I wanted to thank you. For your help Sunday night,” he said.

“Oh.” Kim sighed. “I…wanted to apologize.”

“For what transgression?”

“You asked me for help. And I gave you a hard time. I…shouldn’t have.”

“You were afraid. It was unkind of me to pressure you.”

Kim’s blood ran cold. “I was afraid? _I_ was afraid?” The words came out in a miserable rush. “ _You_ were going to have—you knew how deep in you that fan was! Ratchet had his whole hands—” Not hands, she remembered. Long, snaking tools, some of them with blades on the ends. “And you knew it wasn’t going to be a simple adjustment. You knew there was a problem!”

“I did not _know_ ,” he corrected gently. “I…suspected.”

“You suspected it would be _worse_.”

He glanced away. “I did.”

Kim had to look away, too. “And when you asked me, I—you’ve done so much for me. You have been patient and encouraging. You’re so busy you often need to talk to six or seven people at once, and they’re important people. But you make time for me. When I’m screwing up, you catch it. When I’m scared, you reassure me. And when you asked me for a favor—such a normal, trivial favor in your culture, and I said _no_.” For a moment the words tangled around each other. Kim realized she was standing up and standing so close to his fact that there was surely no way he could focus his optics properly. “I said no. I’m afraid maybe I didn’t just fail you, maybe I…maybe that hurt.” She made herself step back. She sat down hard enough that the canvas chair squeaked.

“I did not perceive your reluctance as a personal rejection.”

Well. That was something. At least. “Thank you. That’s very gracious,” she managed to give a quiet answer. Barely. Her anger and frustration—Kim squeezed her eyes shut.

“You were afraid,” he continued. “When I am running full combat subroutines, I am not inconvenienced by either fear or empathy.”

Kim’s eyes popped open. The conversation was pivoting again.  It was hard enough to follow his thinking sometimes, even on days when her own thoughts weren’t thick and muddied with regret and frustration. She groped for a safe response. “I…don’t think I knew that.”

“I respect that you have no escape from either, and yet you continue to engage with situations and consequences that frighten and grieve you. You do so for the sake of your work. And also as a kindness to me. Thank you. And thank you, specifically, for your help Sunday night. The procedure was less disagreeable than it might have been.”

Kim looked down at the dusty stone between her feet. “I won’t… I won’t give you a hard time again. If you ask for a favor.”

“Peace between us, then?” he asked.

Kim nodded. “Yes, please.” She took a deep breath. “How long until your next conference call?”

“Fourteen minutes.”

“Is it safe? Going into a fight with fear turned off?”

“For me, yes. Tactical calculations can be thrown off by hesitation. I must not waste milliseconds unnecessarily reconsidering an action.”

“Oh.” Kim tried not to think about the implications of that.  She remembered the _thwumm_ and _chwa_ of pulse cannons.

“Where the situation is complex and there are many unknowns, ongoing reconsideration is necessary. Some emotional states are useful for this.”

Kim smiled slightly. “But that isn’t intuition.”

His optics reset. “We have no intuition. Are you asserting that intuition is a process of forming conclusions based on emotional response?”

Kim smile hugely. This— _this_ —conversation was why she loved her work. “Nope. It’s extrapolating from incomplete data.”

He frowned. “There is altogether too much of that.”

“Guessing? Or incomplete data?”

Before he could answer, his optics slackened, showing a shift to internal communications. Kim held still. Finally, he said, “The energon reading in Tennessee has been unusually difficult to triangulate, but Cliffjumper and Blur believe they have the location.” He sighed. “It might be the largest deposit so far on Earth.”

“You don’t seem happy,” Kim said.

“The readings are decidedly odd. The source may not be energon at all, or the triangulation may be thrown off by unusual geological features. The area is honeycombed by abandoned mines.  The location—if it has been correctly identified--is in a temperate rainforest in a steeply hilled area, making access difficult. Cliffjumper will certainly not be able to approach the target area. It is not certain that Blur and Sergeant Ford, travelling at night, will succeed.”

Kim thought of the walk she and Lennox had taken in the Canadian mountains to set sensors for an energon site. “Can they just ask the army to send in humans?”

“If tonight’s attempt fails, that may be necessary.”

“Oh. Well. Tell them good luck for me. If that will make any sense.” She leaned down to retrieve her plate. “I should go. You have a call coming.”

“I invite you to stay. It is pleasant on the mesa. And humans need time out of doors to remain healthy.”

“I don’t want to distract you.”

“The sensor-monitoring required for safety does not qualify as a distraction.”

“Um. Okay then. I’m going to move my chair, so I can see the sunset…?” Kim shifted around so that she was facing south instead of east and put her feet up on a nearby rock. He folded tidily into alt and parked next to her, facing the same way.

 

***

When she woke it was dark and the sound that had woken her was already fading. Kim blinked up at the stars and tried to place the noise. It had been high-pitched.

Abruptly awake, she sat bolt upright. The sound had been a capacitor charging. Frantically, she looked around. Optimus was in root form, again standing at the edge of the mesa.  His shape was a dark outline against the hazy light-pollution of Jaspar. “What’s wrong?” The words were out before she remembered that there actually was an upper limit to the number of conversations he could have at once.

He was silent and motionless for a full minute—perhaps he hadn’t heard. Kim bit her lip. 

It was still warm on the mesa. Nights in the desert were supposed to be cold. And maybe they were, but the stone was still radiating a warm glow. Kim felt around, found her dirty plate. She could fold up her chair and head in. Where was her phone?

Suddenly, Optimus was standing beside her. “You’re already awake. Good. We need to go in.”

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” Quickly, Kim collapsed the chair and tossed it under the last row of solar panels.

“The situation in Tennessee…is going to require closer monitoring.” In a single, smooth movement, he scooped Kim up and cupped both hands around her.

Despite her intent to be ‘cool’ about her sudden change in altitude, Kim glanced downward.  It was too dark to really see much. “What’s happened?”

“Blur and Sergeant Ford were finally able to obtain samples from the energon deposit.”

“That’s great! I would have thought—I mean, doesn’t it usually form underground?”

“It formed within an abandoned mine. However. Some of the samples are definitely not energon.”

“They have samples that aren’t energon? You mean like,” what did they mine in Tennessee? “um, other minerals? Silver? Uranium? Coal?”

“It is not a substance we are able to identify.  Blur is on his way to meet Springer to hand off the samples so Ratchet can examine them here. In the meantime, Wheeljack and Bulkhead have diverted to Chattanooga to help.”

The huge ‘Bot elevator opened as they approached. The light was a searing brilliance that made Kim gasp and bury her face in her hands. The elevator had nearly reached the bottom before Kim had sorted out her thoughts enough to say, “But…some of it is energon?”

“Apparently, so.”

“You sound really worried.” Kim would have thought—even with all the complications—that a confirmed energon deposit would make him happy.

“I dislike both anomalies and extrapolating from the unknown.”

~tbc 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yet another irritation with the Bey disasaters: mecha are either fine or dead. There is no injury. There is no recovery. Also, they never actually get shown eating or sleeping. It’s like he doesn’t understand how life exists. 
> 
> (Untrue, of course. He got his money. The explosions looked pretty. What else would matter?)


	8. Kinesics

**Chapter 13**

She dreamed of Bee’s phoneme app: over and over hearing throated _buzz_ es and _chime_ s and _beep_ s and searching for the right symbol. She woke sweating and exhausted—

And pleased, because yes, she had dreamed like with this with Russian—

And irritated, because she was thoroughly sick of it, and although she was still tired, she did not want to go back to sleep and dream more of _that_.

Max was alone in the cat habitat. She purred a little when Kim scratched her under her chin.

Was the DFAC open this early?  Walking so much every day, she could certainly afford the calories of a big breakfast once in a while.

***

Slipstream, it turned out, was on the balcony. So was Agent Fowler, Lennox, and Fixit. Everyone else—was it everyone? Optimus, Ratchet, Jazz, Bee, Arcee, Drift, and Windblade, so yes, just about everybody—was in the assembly area below. 

Kim sidled up to Fixit. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Buzzsaw is coming down,” he answered, optics focused slackly on the middle distance. “There is a possibility she got a distress call out before those systems were disrupted. If so, the _Nemesis_ may locate her in time to attempt a rescue.”

“Um, what?”

“There was a Decepticon mincon who was sabotaging Earth satellites. We set a trap for her.”

“Oh. Slipstream mentioned….” Kim hugged her arms tight around her. _Perhaps I’ll get used to it; combat, mecha dying This is just the war. They’ve been doing it since the bronze age._ “You know its name?”

“Yes. We collected about five terabytes of useful data before she broke free of the—the label is ‘Trojan.’ That nomenclature seems…odd. Perhaps it is better explained in the tertiary lexicon.  Hm.” He seemed very much like the ‘old’ Fixit: multitasking, distracted, focused on seemingly-arbitrary side issues. Perhaps some of his ‘quirks’ had been about busyness rather than processing speed.

Kim wondered what she should do. Actually… there wasn’t anything she _could_ do. She sat down on the battered couch and rested her elbows on her knees. And waited for the Decepticon saboteur to crash.

***

At 07:06 the falling Decepticon disappeared from radar. It was just north of the Solomon Islands, about seven thousand feet up--and it vanished. Maybe it had simply broken apart in to pieces too small to detect. Maybe it had been retrieved out of the air by the Decepticons.

General Morshower had arrived by then. He wanted to send an aircraft carrier to search for any parts that might have splashed down. Optimus categorically opposed that. If the _Nemesis_ had taken Buzzsaw, it might still be in the area. If it had not, it would be coming to look for remains. Buzzsaw, it seemed, had powerful friends. The risk was terrible.

Kim sat on the couch, listening to them argue, chewing her fingernails.

***

She didn’t make it for breakfast at the DFAC after all.  With all the activity, the morning language lesson with Jazz was canceled, too. Kim joined the trainees in the infirmary.  It was a tidy-and-inventory day (since Ratchet was always neat and organized, a spring cleaning hardly seemed necessary, but nobody questioned him). They spent the morning dust-mopping, carefully washing and drying obscure tools, counting five-gallon tanks of fluids and lubricants….

In addition to June, Carly, Epps, and Dr. Nomura, Pierre was there.  Ratchet had arranged to re-transfer him back. Kim would have liked a chance to talk to him, but as soon as they had the infirmary tidy, Ratchet started drilling the trainees on emergency procedures.

They didn’t get to finish the drills.  At 11:15—nearly an hour late—Springer crashed into the mesa surface, taking out a swath of solar panels and one of the camouflage field generators.

**Chapter 14**

Springer was brought down on an active pallet (which had sprouted little feet and was running like a millipede), half-transformed and with pieces broken off and laid out beside him. Windblade carried Blur, motionless and slack, his paint nanites streaked with swaths of lighter blue.

Ratchet had positioned Epps and Pierre at the instrument console.  Springer, he said, was transmitting erratic and incomplete telemetry. Their job was to get him wired in for external diagnostics. Nurse Darby and Dr. Nomura were on clean-up duty—Springer was leaking energon. While Arcee closed up leaks they would be dumping absorbent on the hazmat.

Carly, he set on the table above the berth he’d uncoiled for Blur. Blur wasn’t transmitting telemetry at all and external scans of his spark showed reduced activity.

Kim was not sure what ‘reduced activity’ meant. She did not know why Pierre frantically called Dr. Nomura over to the instrument console. She stayed on the shelf, out of the way, her hands knotted into fists.

At first, when the alarm started blaring and her phone started vibrating and Ratchet started yelling for humans to clear the area, Kim did not understand what was going on. She expected something—someone—large was coming through. She stepped to the back of the shelf, urgently trying to stay out of the way and see what she was trying to stay out of the way _of._

Running by, Chromia snatched Kim up. She was carrying Pierre in her other hand. Arcee—in three separate units, with a human over the shoulder of each one—zipped past her. Epps, cussing rhythmically, was bringing up the rear at a run.

Chromia’s hands were smaller than Opimus’.  The fingers were only slightly thicker then Kim’s own arms, and one of her legs had slid between them. “What’s going on?” she yelled as she tried to find a handhold above the smooth joint.

“It’s dangerous for humans. Whatever it is.  Ford is in the hospital.” Abruptly she dropped and slid to a stop like a runner sliding into home. “Get out of here, all of you.”

“Wait! I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

Chromia was already running in the other direction. Kim took a step after her. What had gone wrong--?

June seized Kim’s wrist. “Come with me. Now.”

“But we can’t just—”

“We’re exposed. Do you understand? Come on.” Army nurses, it turned out, were both determined and pretty strong. She towed Kim along at a fast walk.

When every human the encountered stepped out of their way, Kim’s attention shifted from the chaos in the ‘Bot infirmary to the possibility that she might actually be in danger. Well, not herself. She’d been up on the shelf. But the other humans—

Oh, god.

Kim had never been to the human infirmary. The nurse on duty—a very tall woman with a Massachusetts accent Kim found reassuringly familiar—sent them all to the to the hazmat shower.

Dressed in scrubs and shivering, Kim and the trainees sat down in the larger exam room while the nurse—masked and gloved--first took blood samples and then checked their vital signs. Dr. Nomura nodded at June and whispered, “Don’t you wish we could just transmit our telemetry?”

June managed a smile at the joke. The others were silent.

“Are any of you experiencing any symptoms?”

Kim felt slightly nauseated, but that was probably stress.

The nurse checked her phone. “Did you see anything…um purple? When you handled Springer?”

No one had. 

Kim sat with her hands clapped between her knees, watching the corner where their clothing and effects had been bagged. To lose another phone so soon? It was like losing a limb. Or part of her voice….

“Um, hello?” Fixit poked his head in the door and then rolled in carrying a box of equipment. “Oh. Yes. Here you are.”

The nurse, eyes wide, stepped in front of him. “This isn’t a ‘Bot area,” she began.

“I have been sent to scan them, Lieutenant Foster.” Fixit trilled nervously. “I am under orders.”

Dr. Nomura was on his feet at once, questioning Fixit in rapid fire tech-speak. Fixit made a non-committal noise and began to unpack and assemble a device from the box he was carrying.

The nurse went to the wall phone.

Fixit scanned them each with the thing he assembled, then made them stand in front of a round device and scanned them again.  “There are no traces of the corrupt energon on any of them. Where is their personal kibble?”

Epps silently pointed at the pile of plastic bags in the corner. Clicking softly to himself, Fixit scanned those, too. “No,” he said. “It is not here.”

“It can’t be that easy,” June whispered.

“No,” Fixit said. “It is not easy.  We have a great many difficult problems. Your contamination is not one of them.” He sighed.

Carly hopped off her chair, bounced on her toes, and went to collect her clothing from the pile on the floor.  Epps and Pierre followed suit a moment later.

“We’ve started quarantine procedures,” June began. “How can we just...not….”

Dr. Nomura glanced at her, then retrieved his phone from the bag of personal effects. “Fixit, transmit to me what you were looking for. If it’s radioactive…that is hard to miss.”

“If it’s radioactive,” June said, “It would have set off the safety monitors.”

Kim swallowed. There were safety monitors? For _radioactivity_? Was that reassuring? She glanced at Fixit—who seemed to be vibrating slightly. “Are you okay?” she asked.

He leaned forward and whispered, “What would I have said to Maggie, if you had all been…Sergeant Ford is in stasis lock!” He trilled unhappily.

What did ‘stasis lock’ even mean for a human? Humans didn’t do that. They…went into comas. Scrap. Kim put an arm around Fixit’s shoulders.  It was a spectacularly unsatisfying hug. Fixit was cool and hard, with inconvenient corners and gaps. Kim was about to pull back from the awkwardness, when he turned in toward her, _chirrup_ ing and _click_ ing. She had been listening hard enough to Cybertronix to detect the shiver of emotional distortion in his vocalizer. “Hey. Hey. It’s going to be okay.”

It was a stupid thing to say. Even if everything else was okay, Kim did not know about Ford.  But instead of calling her on it, Fixit whispered, “It’s not supposed to be _real_.  Nobody accepts the phenomena.  It’s an artistic trope.” The last ended in a quiet wail that made Kim’s teeth itch.

Kim patted him firmly and glanced around for help, but everyone had gone off to put their clothes back on except for the nurse, Foster, who was reporting into a phone.

“Fixit? Hey. Let’s—Let’s—” What? Take a deep breath? They didn’t breathe. “Can you, um, discipline your field? Make it look like it’s calm?”

He pulled back and looked at her. “Why? There is no one here who can see it.”

Kim cleared her throat. It occurred to her again that before his injury, Fixit had not asked hard questions.  “Right. But. For humans, sometimes pretending we are calm fools our bodies, our, um, system feedback, into thinking we are calm. Right?”

“Why?”

Why? “Humans don’t think well when we are upset.”  Perhaps the it was not the time to go into the details of amygdala hijack.

He nodded slowly. “Some mecha also.” He paused. “Prime did a very good job partitioning my drives. But I am having difficulty not becoming…overwhelmed. Did I use that word correctly?”

“You’re doing fine.”

Resonant _click_ , flat _click_ , four different tonal _bing_ s and a _squeal_. Kim took a deep breath and asked him, “What was that last sound? I’m sure it isn’t in my alphabet.”

“No, it was a punctuation.”

“Punctuation is audible.” Of course it was. Had she known that?

Fixit nodded. “It is clearer and more efficient than using tone.”

Punctuation sounds. Kim sighed. Had she diverted him enough? “Are you okay?”

He sighed back. “I do not know.”

Kim retrieved her clothing—the last bag remaining—and headed into the bathroom to change. Fixit started to follow. “There’s not room. And it would be weird,” Kim said.

That got antennae. “Why?”

That was a good question. Fixit had no more interest in human nudity than Max. “Humans do it alone. Unless they’re both doing it. Or they live together.” That was such a lie. But Kim didn’t have the energy to get into sex. Or nudist colonies. Or –actually, Fixit could probably be taken to one of the more outrageous music festivals.

Fixit made a doubtful noise, but he waited while Kim retreated behind a door to change.

Her phone vibrated as she retrieved it. Oh. A lot of messages. Six _status report_ glyphs from Optimus. They were spaced six and a half minutes apart. Was the timing meaningful? Or had he automated it? A text message: FIXIT REPORTS ALL CLEAR. I AM CONCERNED BY YOUR CONTINUED LACK OF COMMUNICATION.

 _Aw. Hell_. Kim winced. Laboriously, and with two false starts, she spelled out: FINE. SORRY and sent it. Then she sent a blushing and apologetic emoji. Maybe she should do a comparison on the use of glyphs versus emojis.

The Decepticon plan to induce more energon seemed to be sort of working. Except some of it seemed to have come out _wrong_ somehow? It was really toxic to humans. And mecha? Was that why Springer had arrived late and crashed?

“Kim?” Fixit called.

“Yes, coming.”

Since ‘Bot territory was still off limits, Kim followed Fixit up the stairs and through the winding corridors into Fowler’s office. She waited in the corner—willing to be helpful and absolutely useless—while Fowler set up the cover story: illegally dumped toxic waste, CDC, EPA, FBI, Federal Marshals, the whole nine yards. 

Well, the FBI part was real.   Agents from the Chattanooga office were closing off the area. There wasn’t anything they could actually do until the Autobots got drones on site to work out exactly how much energon and contaminant they were dealing with and come up with a plan to remove it.

While pretending it was normal, human toxic waste.

When Fowler raced off to catch a plane to Tennessee, Kim walked down toward ‘Bot country.  The path was blocked off with cones and a guard just past the bridge terminal. So. No going home yet.

***

When June found her at four-thirty, Kim was sitting in the DFAC trying to make a milkshake out of the innards of an Ice cream sandwich and a carton of chocolate milk.

“You can stay at my house,” she said. “We’ll tell Jack your place had a water leak.”

Kim grimaced. “Thanks, but. I shouldn’t go.”

“There’s no point in staying. Ratchet has quarantined ‘Bot country until tomorrow at least. You don’t want to sleep in the visitor’s section. The sheets they supply you with….really, don’t.”

Kim poked her muddy slush with the fork she’d been using as a blender.  “How’s Springer and Blur?”

Sighing, June sat down. “Springer is conscious. Blur is possibly hallucinating. I’ll have to ask Ratchet for more detail when he’s less busy, ‘cause that makes no sense.  Oh, and Ford stable enough that they think they’ll be able to transport him back to Nellis tomorrow. That’s good news.”

Kim nodded. “None of the other mecha are showing…?”

“No. They think they managed to contain the samples Blur was carrying. Come on, I’ve got a pot of soup at home.”

***

Jack, it turned out, was a nice kid. He made a sympathetic face when told the story about ‘poor Kim’s apartment’ and didn’t ask any more questions. He showed her the fold-down futon chair in the den and got out a set of sheets. He gave his mom an odd look when she turned on the news—and another when she left it on during dinner.

The story June had been looking for didn’t come up until the meal was done and Jack had taken off on his bike to return a video game to a friend.

The local news reporter standing in the woods looked distinctly nervous about the “illegal hazardous dumping” defiling the Chimneys State Natural Area.  One of the “CDC” Hummers was almost certainly Bulkhead. The “National Guard” soldiers briefly shown securing the area included a glimpse of what was probably Will Lennox. The preliminary identification of the “hazardous waste” was “dioxin.”

When the short item finished, June turned off the television.

Kim buried her face in her hands. _Ah. Damn._

“Kim?” June asked softly. “Do you know what went wrong?”

“What? No. Maybe it was a long shot anyway. Earth isn’t Cybertron. Maybe it isn’t supposed to make Energon.” She swallowed. “How dangerous is this stuff? Do you know?”

“No. Ratchet isn’t taking calls from the trainees.”

“No….” They would keep the humans out of it as much as they could, unsure how to tell them whatever they were discovering.

**Chapter 15**

It was still dark outside when June knocked softly on the den doorframe. “Kim? I’ve got to go to Nellis. Ford’s stable enough to transport, and they’re bringing him in.”

Kim blinked. Her eyes were gritty and the back of her neck was sweaty. “What?” Nellis? The big base down south…. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, there’s nothing you can do.  Oh. Find anything you want in the fridge for breakfast.”

“Right. Thanks.”

There was no going back to sleep after that. Kim got up and took a shower in the modern, civilian, comfortable bathroom. All the streams in the shower nozzle worked.  It was…weird. Kim spent most of the shower trying to articulate the weirdness to herself, finally settling on the description “well-lit,” “not cavernous,” and “warm.”

She found milk and cereal--and no tea of any kind. Coffee.

While she was trying to decide how desperate the caffeine need was, her phone announced a text. It was from Arcee. She was on her way through town and wanted to know if Kim needed a ride back to base.

Right then. She could wait for actual tea. There wasn’t much to ‘pack,’ as she had arrived only with her bag. While she was looking for a laundry basket to dump the used sheets in, Jack stumbled past, attempting to put his sneakers on and jog at the same time.

“Your mom had to leave early,” Kim said. “I’ve got a ride coming for me.”

“Yeah. She left a note.  I’ll set the door so it will lock behind you. I just got a call from KO Burger—Mindy’s sick, I get to take her shift!”

Kim belatedly remembered that the washer was in the kitchen.  She followed Jack. “You sound delighted,” she said. She had eaten KO Burger. It wasn’t awful, but surely wasn’t worthy of excitement.

“I’m saving for a motorcycle.”

“Oh.”  Kim winced on June’s behalf.

So, off course, he was leaving the garage when Kim’s phone announced the arrival of Arcee. He was goggling at the three bikes lined up at the curb when Kim pulled the front door shut after her.

Oh. God. What if he came down? What if she had to introduce “three” people who had no names? But he just stared as Kim waved an imitation of a cheerful good-bye.

The middle unit’s rider seemed to slide backwards in the seat and a jade-green helmet burped out of subspace in front of her. Kim tried to put the helmet on smoothly, but of course it took a second try to get it on front-wards. Then the clasp was weird. Not alien-weird, just not something Kim was used to. 

Kim climbed onto the motorcycle, trying to look like she knew what she was doing and, naturally, failing. She snuck a look at Jack Darby.  Yes, he was looking.

 _Damn_.

The trip back was both thrilling and embarrassing.  Her first trip on a motorcycle—and the motorcycle was judging her performance. It wasn’t even like she could properly ask for instructions there in the street with Jack watching….

It was awkward.  And windy. And every time they took a turn, Kim thought she was going to fall off.

What would the impact of being a bad passenger be on her research? How could an Autobot respect a human who couldn’t even _ride_ properly?  Well, maybe the mockery that would surely follow would function as a bonding experience. Especially if Kim were gracious about it.

Arcee didn’t slow as they came roaring out of the entry tunnel. They took the right turn toward the infirmary—and sped past it. They passed the bridge station, too. Kim had been looking forward to an _end_ to this particular ride.

And then Arcee glided to a stop at the newly-expanded catwalk that was used for formal meetings. Optimus, Jazz, and Springer were lined up in front of it.  General Moreshower, an additional general, and six guys in suits were on it. And—scrap—one of the guys in suits was Keller’s annoying assistant.

Trying not to stumble, Kim eased off the motorcycle and held out the helmet to Arcee. She retrieved and disappeared it as she finished transforming into her unified root form. Quelling a burst of dread, Kim turned toward the gantry.  General Moreshower was pointing to an empty seat on the far right.

Great. Wonderful. Helmet-hair on top of no gel, _and_ yesterday’s underwear. But sure. Let’s go to a meeting of the high muckity-mucks.

“—estimate an additional nine to twelve kilograms of the flawed energon remain in the shaft.”

“What about the other shafts?” One of the suits asked. “That whole area is a honeycomb of abandoned mines.”

Jazz had his visor flipped up and his shoulders were canted at an angle calculated to communicate casualness and approachability. “We’ve got on-ground and aerial surveys goin’ round the clock. So far, there’s no sign any other shafts are affected.”

General Moreshower glanced at the assembled civilians in suits and asked, “What removal procedure have you decided on?”

With cheerful confidence, Jazz explained that the NEST team, in hazmat suits, were preparing to pack the chunks of poisonous energon into steel boxes filled with lead scrap. Wheeljack and Bulkhead would then coat the boxes in a thick layer of molten glass.   When the glass hardened, it could then be sealed in plastic and safely transported.

“What? Just like that? Molten glass?” the strange general asked.

“Why would it be difficult?” Springer asked, breaking his silence. “The raw material is locally abundant, and Wheeljack has already obtained an acceptable crucible.”

“Organic life,” Optimus said to him, “is very susceptible to heat damage. General Pierce, all due diligence will be employed to ensure that we do not cause unnecessary harm to this eco system.  It has been  necessary to clear a small area in the immediate vicinity of the shaft opening. It will be necessary to clear more. The Autobots will, of course, pay for site rehabilitation out of our patent account.”

From the look on the general’s face, his reluctance had nothing to do with the potential for forest fire.

The discussion floated on around her—personnel movements, equipment, schedules, airports. What was she here for? What was she supposed to do? She could listen. That was what her advisor had told her about meetings: listen, notice who talks. But it wasn’t like she was studying _them_ , the humans. They were unreadable win their suits and uniforms and unreadable scowls.

She didn’t realize the meeting ended until suddenly it was done and the screens for the remote locations were shut down and the men in suits were headed for the rickety metal stairs. Oh.

But even as she checked her phone and her purse and considered the route down, Springer paused and held out a hand. It was a large hand, as large as Ironhide’s. “Dr. Montgomery?” he asked politely.

Right. Okay. Better than a motorcycle, at least. There was a gate in the catwalk. Kim opened it, settled onto the waiting hand. Springer turned quickly, following Jazz and Optimus. His human-carrying form was precise, though. She felt disoriented but not precarious.

They walked—long, loud, graceful steps—the tunnel to ‘Bot country instead of taking alt forms. It was hard to tell from her position, but Springer seemed to be favoring one leg.  Was he not recovered enough to transform? Was it impolite to ask? Or impolite to ignore it?

“Is it the color of the ties?” Springer asked suddenly.

Jazz shook his head. “The ties are…decorative.”

“That seems unlikely,” Springer said with too much politeness.

Jazz shrugged.

“So where are the rank insignia?”

An exaggerated sigh. “They’re civilians. No rank, just like ours. So no insignia,” Jazz sounded overly patient.

“But the only point of wearing a uniform,” Springer protested, “is standardization of rank insignia.”

Jazz sighed. “They aren’t wearing uniforms. Kim. Explain business suits?”

Optimus, walking just ahead, made a single amused noise.

“Uh. Well. It’s only metaphorically a uniform. It’s like…an art form, with very narrow standards and a competition to see who can execute it best. Um” Kim winced inwardly. “Also, business suites are great for concealing bodily imperfections.  Powerful men or rich men…can spend a lot of money and achieve…aesthetics. Um. Especially since younger, and less powerful men sometimes have an advantage in, ulp, physical appearance.” Kim was blushing at the shallowness and utter arbitrariness of human clothing.

“They got ta compensate for not bein’ able to transform,” Jazz said. “Not controllin’ their appearance makes em all kinda glitched. No offense, Kim.” He shrugged.

“No, it’s all totally gitched,” Kim agreed.

Springer’s sensor crest had arched a little higher and was tilted toward Kim. He looked distinctly uncomfortable at carrying a creature as bizarre as she was. She patted the finger that was loosely curved around her waist.

“You don’t wear suits,” Springer said.

“I own a suit. But no, I don’t wear it.  I’m not competing with other humans.  I…dressed really blandly, actually. Until I realized I wasn’t fitting in with my informants. You take looking snazzy seriously.”

Springer nodded slowly.  “How is the best execution of the form judged?”

“Quality—expensiveness—of materials.  Precision of fit. Taste and fashionable-ness, but that is tougher to measure. Shoes reveal wealth, and that is a clue, I guess. But price isn’t everything.”

“Of course not. That would make too much sense.”

“ _That_ would make sense?” Kim asked.

“Resource allocation is a reliable indicator of status,” Springer explained.

“The humans are not panicking,” Optimus said. “If their behavior is sensible, I am hardly in a position to criticize their appearance.” Kim winced inwardly: that had been a rebuke.

Springer’s crest dropped and he looked somehow meeker. “As you say.”

Jazz sighed. “I was not expectin’ an artistic motif to cause so much trouble. Dark energon, of all things! What an outdated cliché.”

“Statistically,” Springer said slowly, “it could be a coincidence.”

“A myth with a description that included atomic weight and vibrational frequencies. Heh. That was never suspiciously specific.” Jazz flickered his visor in a pretty good facsimile of an eye roll.

“Kim,” Optimus said, “Do you have time to meet with us?”

She reminded herself that the mecha would care even less about her underwear then the human bigwigs had. “Sure. Of course.”

They settled at the largest table in the mech cantina. Springer seemed uncertain, for a moment, about how to put Kim down. He laid his hand flat on the tabletop and let her scoot herself off his palm. The table was hewn from stone—or, from the glassy finish, not hewn but heat-sculpted. Was it utilitarian? Or art? Who had made it, and had it been an act of beauty? Living in the long forgotten office corridor, Kim didn’t often think about interior decorating and aesthetics. 

The ‘Bots were sitting on stools around the table.  Kim retreated toward the open spot between Springer and Jazz and sat down cross-legged. The table was…hard.  She forgot the discomfort in the barrage of questions that followed.

Questions about Tennessee: Were hillbillies real? Would federal employees be perceived as ‘Revenuers’ in disguise? Was dumping toxic waste  in a natural area something people in Tennessee would do—or at least believe someone, somewhere was evil enough to do?

Questions about public reactions: If no culprit for the ‘dumping’ was ever identified, would outrage at the injustice keep the incident in the public eye? If—Primus forbid—another eruption of toxic, mythical energon occurred, could the explanation be used again? Or would it be suspect?

Questions about civil authorities: Was their similarity in appearance an indication of similarity of mindset? (Springer, of course).   Could any of the technical intricacies of energon formation be explained to human non-scientists, or should that area be avoided? It wasn’t like the data could be downloaded directly (Springer, again).

Kim answered and answered and answered.  Her answers, she admitted, were not always helpful. She did not know what sort of decisions powerful men who could not understand the mysterious alien science involved would make. They might be rational, of course, but she suspected that for some the priority was their own careers (but enjoyment of power and personal hostility might also play a role). Jazz nodded sagely; Springer’s armor flared slightly in outrage; Optimus just listened.

Kim missed whatever cue indicated the meeting was done.  Suddenly, Optimus was dismissing Jazz and Springer and asking Kim if she had time for one other matter.

“Sure. Always.” She stood stiffly and came to the middle of the table, so she wouldn’t feel so awkwardly far away. Kim had worked out of teaching assistant offices smaller than the surface of this table. “What’s up?”

“How did General Moreshower seem to you in the meeting?”

“Um. The same.  He doesn’t talk a lot. He lets other people run on in meetings.”

“Hm.”

“Why? You pick up more biological data than I do. Did he seem off to you in some way?”

“Hm.” The hesitation was palpable. Kim waited. “You may not be aware that we…monitor the entire base and all communications in the area.”

“Okay. Yeah, I kind of assumed, I guess.” It was why she kept her field notes on a computer with no wifi card. “They—NEST--must assume it, too?”

“A certain amount of mutual espionage is tolerated. There is an aphorism: ‘Trust but verify.’”

Kim choked back a surprised laugh. “Okay. Yes.”

“We monitor all electronic communications. On the human side, Ms. Madsen reports directly to Mr. Keller. Dr. Nomura relays situational observations to the NATO secretary general.”

“Oh. I…didn’t know that.”

“Recently, General Moreshower has expressed concern that the arrival of Megatron and the accretion of tainted energon in the planet’s crust might…weaken our commitment to Earth’s defenses.”

“He didn’t show it in the meeting.”

“No. However. I believe he will request a meeting with you either today or tomorrow. You are the human best situated to gauge our  intentions. He will ask your opinion.”

“Oh. Oh! Do I accept the meeting?”

“That depends. Your position depends on a relationship with human NEST authorities that is based on honesty and authenticity.   If you can honestly state that you believe we have no intention of abandoning the Earth, it would be a help to me for you to speak to him. If not, perhaps you could be be….unavailable. ”

“Well of course I believe—Even if you had somewhere to go, you couldn’t leave Megatron _here_ with energon forming in the ground!”

A soft _clunk_ and _fwssh_ : a systems check starting. “Not how I would phrase it. But essentially correct. If you are confident in your assessment, I would consider it a favor….”

“Okay. If he calls, I go.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you have a moment?” He was unimaginably busy, surely. But he had lots of bandwidth.

“I suppose you have many questions,” he answered, leaning further down over the table.

“Well. One,” Kim said heavily. “Dark energon.”

“Apparently.” Apparently—what? She would be curious? It would be dark energon? He didn’t elaborate.

“Fixit said it wasn’t supposed to exist.”

“Dark energon is widely assumed to be a classical poetic metaphor.”

“Oh. Did you think so?”

“I was a historian.” He paused. “I never imagined I would actually encounter a sample.”

“Oh,”  she said in a small voice. “Will there—What went wrong when Megatron tried to cultivate energon? Is there…is it likely to happen again?”

“Kim. It is possible that the formation of dark energon was deliberate.”

“But—my god, why? It’s poisonous! Even to mecha!”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. “Are there not substances poisonous to humans that are nevertheless useful?”

“So it’s a weapon.” Of course it was….

“Not one he will waste on your people. Perhaps one he will not waste on us, either.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I do, I will explain.”

Kim stepped to the edge of the table, the balls of her feet resting on the precise corner. “Status ping,” she said.

He smiled slightly. “You have no idea how funny that sounds in English.”

She executed a little theatrical bow. “I live to amuse,” she said.

He started to answer—and then stopped, sweeping his optical lenses over her placement and stance. Slowly, almost warily, he shifted his frame forward. In this position-- his thorax just over a foot away from Kim’s nose--it was impossible to see his face. “It is kind of you to offer this,” he said softly. “I am…touched….”

Kim bowed her head. It was a long way to the floor. “Are you unpacking that metaphor?”

“Yes. It has reminded me that this position is not mutually satisfying.”

“Never mind. I’ll develop a paired-associate response eventually.” Humans could change their programming, just not as fast as mecha. “This is good.”

“And yet,” she could hear the frown, “You are growing more alert. Distinctly. I am breaching your personal space.” He started to ease back.

“You are _welcome_ in my personal space,” she said quickly. But she _was_ tensing up. Did his sheer size make her nervous? Was it the lack of eye contact? Kim forced herself to take a deep breath. The air from his vents was warm and slightly iron-smelling. _Trees are big_ , she reminded herself. _They don’t make eye contact_. “Are there any trees older than you are?”

“The oldest confirmed tree is five-thousand and sixty-two years old.”

Older than trees, then. Kim took another breath and let it out. Her left hand drifted up, settled against the armor plating beside the central vent. For a moment she was unsure. But no. He had promised that the adaptation to Earth hazards had included human sweat. “You didn’t answer my status ping,” she whispered.

“All of my sensor systems are operating within three percent of spec. Ratchet has decreased my supplementary fuel ratio to three-point-two…at least for the next few months.”

“I’m sorry. I know that’s a sore point.”

“I accept your sympathy.”

“Am I—” Kim swallowed. “Am I supposed to nag you about that or anything? Is that part of, um, Is that a responsibility I accepted when I agreed to accompany you to the doctor?” Her voice was almost steady.

“It is not necessary. Ratchet is closely overseeing my mechanisms. I am certain that if he is unsatisfied with my cooperation, he will inform you.”

“If you don’t want—I feel like I should say that if you don’t want me used like that, I won’t go along with it. But…we might be past that.”

She thought he was hesitating. And then, perhaps, that he was refusing to answer. More than a minute went by before she realized how warm she was, how soft and heavy she felt, how still everything had become. “You’ve done this before,” she whispered. After the washrack that last time….

“Do you perceive it?”

“Kind of.” All the hair on her arms was standing straight up. The skin at the back of her neck prickled. Kim let her eyes drift closed. “This is your field. You’re…doing something….”

“Yes.”

“It’s warm. And heavy.” Kim’s thoughts were warm and heavy now, too. She sighed. She felt…unruffled. She had almost forgotten what it felt like not to be worried about seven or eight things at once. “I can’t reciprocate this.” What had she been thinking, to step forward and offer overlapping? She was a human. She couldn’t give this kind of comfort. Going native was a fantasy--

Her sadness and shame faded abruptly. “Reciprocity is not expected,” he said.

“Because you’re Prime,” she murmured. “Hierarchy thing.”

“Not quite. Because of the Matrix, my field is especially strong, and my control is nuanced. An analogy: if you were at a birthday party with Phil Collins, you would not expect to conduct _Happy Birthday_.”

Heh. Phil Collins. Kim absently filed that away under his preference for 80s music, and smiled. “Chromia does, though.”

“Chromia. Occasionally Ironhide, Ratchet, Jazz. Yes. I am blessed with good friends.”

The warmth was pressed tight around her. How was it possible to feel so cozy and bright in such a huge, cavernous, drafty space? Kim tipped her head back. She could barely see the tip of the underside of his chin, high above her. “Not me. I can’t,” she whispered. She couldn’t give this back.

“No.  You will have to offer comfort in other ways. I will learn to accept it in other ways. This closeness that is a palpable reminder of your friendship and trust. The effort you have put into learning alien sounds, so you can learn my name and the words that are important to me.”

“It won’t be the same.”

“If it were the same, beloved friend, it would not be you.”

“This is nice.” It was not what she had intended to say.  She breathed in, noticed she was forgetting to breathe out. Oh.

“Kim. I am not certain of an exit strategy. Disengagement is usually mutual, but you cannot perceive or control….Hm. Step backward, very slowly. And again. Do you feel all right?”

She nodded, suddenly a little confused.

“I am attempting to harmonize with your usual frequencies. It is…odd. Step back again.”

And suddenly she noticed the room was cool and drafty and she was high in the air in the middle of a table larger than a commuter tram. “Oh. That was. Is that what it feels like to be you?”

He tilted his head, scanning. “No?”

“I mean—are you that calm _all the time_?”

“You know I am not.”

“Sorry. I meant—I actually, um….?”

“You do not have words in English to classify your experience,” he said gently. “And I am not certain even our words will apply to your experience.”

Kim nodded.

“Unfortunately, I must leave you now. Ratchet wishes to go over his results of the tests on the energon samples Blur retrieved. I can give you a lift back to the balcony.”

“Yeah. I need something to eat. And I should change clothes.”

“You are wearing the same shirt as yesterday.” His optics flickered across her and then away. “It is something you avoid.”

Kim blinked. “Really?”

“It was Arcee who noticed first. It is statistically unlikely, given the n value, that the pattern is not deliberate.”

“And instead of asking…how many of you are doing math on it?”

“It is very anomalous. Shoes, jeans, shorts, all of those may be worn consecutively—”

“Yes, I get it. You could have asked.”

“Perhaps the topic was delicate. Or trivial. NEST personnel regularly wear the same clothing consecutively.” He offered his hand at an angle behind her.

Kim made sure she had her bag and phone and sat down. “This is why we have a deal about not being offended by questions.” She snorted. “Anyway, changing the shirts is just aesthetics. I’m wearing the same underwear. And socks.”

“A more urgent concern?”

“Much.”

~tbc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, Martha, for catching the typos in this section. They were unusually prevalent and weird. 
> 
> Thanks, everybody, who has stuck with me this far. I'm about 40 pages ahead, and I think I have less than 20 pages more on this one.


	9. Phatic Expression

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting a day early to celebrate: the latest trailer for the Bumblebee movie is out, and it isn't horrible. Not one explosion in the whole thing *and* you can focus your eyes on his face. 
> 
> Yeah, at this point the bar is set low.

**Chapter 16**

It was five-seventeen. A couple of hours before dark in Tennessee.

Kim got out the hot pot and her emergency ramen. Her step-mom would give her hell—it was the kind of junk food that actually shortened life-expectancy—

Yeah. Never mind. Dark energon. Dark energon at the spooky planet at the end of the street with the wrought iron fence and peeling paint and bats.

Or whatever.

She hadn’t mentioned that at her meeting with Morshower. She hadn’t mentioned that Earth was a creepy cliché before it had started oozing mythical poison. She had admitted that the Autobots were afraid of the glittery, lavender, toxic lumps of almost-energon (Ratchet had showed the trainees video—except for Epps, who was deployed in Chattanooga—as part of an orientation after lunch).  Optimus had said to be honest.  She had told the general they were afraid of Megatron getting it. 

And that was clearly true.  It also—when she thought about it—was obviously not the whole story.

She added the flavor packet to the noodles and found a clean mug.

Mecha didn’t do comfort eating. 

There had been no interview up on the mesa, of course. Phase one of packing up the dark energon for shipment, sealing the samples in steel boxes insulated with lead, had been completed by human NEST personnel during the day. Under the cover of darkness, with the workday ‘ended’ and the news vans gone, Wheeljack and Bulkhead would coat the containers in melted glass, let it cool to about two-hundred and sixty degrees and then wrap it in plastic. Ironhide, Hound, and Cliffjumper would stand guard and keep out any curious humans who came up the road.

There was, in addition to the dark energon, about fifty kilograms of regular energon identified at the site.  That could be collected over the next few days once the hazardous by-product was out of the way.

Easy-peasy.

Kim was used to _feeling bad_ about being in the field. It was proportional. There was lots to feel bad about. She never did it right, never noticed enough, never remembered enough, always—in new and unexpected ways—found she had said the wrong thing.

Always hovering in the background was the knowledge that her debt to her informants could never be paid: her debt for science, her debt for her career, her debt for the privilege of witnessing people’s lives.

For every soul who was eager to tell their story, to have their reality documented, there was one who was sure she was getting it all wrong and two who barely tolerated the nosy outsider. It was none of science’s business.

It was heavy and exhausting, and she must never resent it and—

Well, damn. At least it had been familiar. This new _feeling bad_ was completely different. Gone was any concern for her career or professional future: this was her job until the world ended or she retired. Publication? Every day she prayed it would be a decade or two before either her peers or the public saw her work. The need to publish would only mean that everything had gone so far to shit it was impossible to keep twenty-foot alien robots a secret any more.

And the giant aliens depended on her. It was _their_ future on the line, _their_ hope of home. Even the ones who didn’t like her, even the ones who barely noticed her. They all depended on her work.

How fast could she write? And could she write well enough to convey their personhood? Humans were always ready to deny each other personhood.  Respecting the rights of machines--?

And in the meantime, a guy in a uniform with little glittering stars on his collar wanted to know her _opinion_ about giant alien motivation and state of mind. ‘Be honest,’ Optimus had said.

Was it spying if everyone knew who you worked for?

Optimus was playing the long game. Lying was a short-term strategy.

Kim ate every last noodle. Even the broken bits that tried to slide between the tines of the fork.

 _The long game_ , she reminded herself. It was no good freaking out and getting exhausted now.  Success was not this month or this year. Success was the next fifty years.

 _He is counting on me_.

***

Kim sat on the ancient balcony couch between Dr. Nomura and Carly. The large screens in the assembly area were showing different views of the project site. In addition to direct visual feeds from Wheeljack, Bulkhead, and Ironhide, there was a thermal image from Windblade circling above and a couple of cameras perched in trees getting a wider view. It was hard to know where to look.

Ratchet paced the assembly area, restless, paying as much attention to his internal data streams as the screens. Springer sat on a stool in the corner, listing slightly to lean against the wall. He looked noticeably uncomfortable and tired--and what cue was giving that away? Kim was sure she was right, though. No one had come out and said anything, but Kim guessed he still might not be recovered enough to transform. Arcee stood next to him, close enough to overlap but paying overt attention to the screens rather than him.

Optimus and Jazz were in human country, overseeing the operation with General Morshower at the gantry.  Kim was glad not to have been invited along.

 Wheeljack had dug out a narrow hole in the cleared area before the mine opening.  He’d lined it with a thin steel sheet and filled it with sand from a pile a bit down the hill. The sand was melted now, liquid glass weakly glowing in the dim illumination of the portable lights.

Lined up on the ground were eight metal cases, each slightly larger than a shoebox.  There was a chain attached to each box.  Bulkhead lifted one by the chain and passed it to Wheeljack, who slowly dipped it into the makeshift crucible.

Slowly, smoothly, the first box sank into the glistening pool of silicon goo. He eased it back out, rolled it in a layer of sand-and-something, and wrapped in a sheet of—it looked like silk, but that couldn’t be. Something alien and fluttery and glossy—and hung it from a pole braced between two trees for the first stage of cooling.  Glass couldn’t cool too quickly; it would crack.

One down.

Mecha could move fast. Tonight, they…weren’t.  Every step followed the same, patient, careful procedure. As if each box were the first one, as if each chain were fragile.

Slipstream came out and settled on the balcony beside the couch. He had brought Max, complete with rhinestone harness and leash. Very fashionable. He was feeding her tiny bites of fresh fish and making a deep, humming sound. Max seemed distracted enough by the treat to notice neither the harness nor the new location.

Waiting for the glass to cool a bit could not be rushed, either.  Bulkhead piled up the unused sand.  Wheeljack sorted and cleaned tool before popping them into his subspace. Sometimes he poked the hanging sample cases.

Kim got sleepy.  So did Max, who curled up on Slipstream’s leg and purred herself to sleep.

Bulkhead laid out a set of larger steel boxes, partially filling them with crushed granite. One after the other, Wheeljack took down the samples and nestled them in a layer of stone. Bulkhead wound a sheet of plastic around the outer box, tight, like a spider cocooning a spider to snack on later.  He set the package down and reached for another.

The monitor directly opposite the sofa displayed a perfect view of the explosion that tossed Bulkhead head over heels. The lights went out immediately. And then the screen flashed to the green stand-by.

The jarring whines of alerts and combat alarms saturated the next minute or so, pushed out of the PA system and every phone. Kim stood up. And then sat down. There was nothing to be done from here. The ground bridge wasn’t working. Oh. God. She tugged on her hair.

Dr. Nomura had his phone out—texting STANDING BY to Ratchet.  Which—right. What else was there to do?

Slipstream tapped her arm. “Kim? Would you take Max back to her habitat?”

Numbly, Kim nodded and lifted up the large, orange cat.

***

When she returned the alarms were off, and two of the screens were showing slow and stuttering satellite pictures: one, optical light images that showed blackness ripped by bright explosions and another infrared which was a rippling kaleidoscope of colored streaks. Unsteadily, Kim walked to the railing and stared, trying to find the shapes of mecha in the chaotic images.

Ironhide and Cliffjumper were still both sending visual feeds. Ironhide’s were weirdly crisp—was this how he saw the world when he was using his targeting sensors?  The view there looked upwards; he was focusing on small, fast aircraft. They moved so quickly it was dizzying.

In the assembly area below, Ratchet was physically blocking the external tunnel.  Arcee and Springer were arguing with him, Springer in Cybertronix, Arcee in angry, pleading English. “We have to at least try!”

Ratchet wasn’t having any of it. “It will take hours for you to get there! It will be over before you are out of Nevada!”

“Then we’ll be on hand to clean up the mess—” Arcee started.

“If he could make the trip at all, it would not be carrying your added mass!”

A yelp from Carly brought Kim’s attention back to the screens. Cliffjumper’s feed was showing only a swirl of dark trees backlit by fire. Ironhide was running, crashing through undergrowth he was simply too large to fit between. There were two mecha fighting, highlighted and color-saturated by the strange augmentation. It took Kim a moment to recognize one of them as Cliffjumper.

Cliffjumper’s screen abruptly went dark but he was still fighting. He was tangled with his opponent, shoving and pulling like wrestlers. They fell suddenly, and it was several long seconds before they appeared again, sliding down the mountainside, taking out a swath of trees like a fast bulldozer. They slammed into a rocky outcrop and one of the figures rose—

Larger than Cliffjumper, the Decepticon was all hard angles and sharp points, a random spray of sensors on its helm rather than a face. It glanced up the hill at Irohnide and then grabbed Cliffjumper at the hip and shoulder and pulled—

There was a burst of light that seemed to spill out and dance and whirl over Cliffjumper’s armor, like fireworks or Saint Elmo’s fire, a graceful brilliance in the darkness—and then it flashed and was gone. It was nothing like the weapons Kim had seen the other mecha using.

“Oh, my god,” Carly squeaked. “Was that—”

“He has lost spark containment,” Dr. Nomura whispered.

On the screen, the Decepticon spun away, leaped for the air, transformed, even as Ironhide fired his rail gun at the retreating form.  The Decepticon was shielded. The augmented cameras showed the slugs slow and fall away.

Over at the tunnel mouth, Ratchet was shouting, his voice giving way to a loud burst of static. He stumbled backwards.  Arcee, starting to dart past him, suddenly cried out and dropped to her knees.  Springer bellowed a curse in Cybertronix. Kim recognized the expletives _pit_ and _unmaking_. He seized Arcee by the arm and hauled her down the tunnel. She stumbled for a moment and then began to run.

Kim looked back at the screen. Ironhide was running through trees again. And then, abruptly, his screen, too, went dark.

Oh.

Slowly Kim sank down and sat with her legs dangling over the edge of the balcony, her arms wrapped around the lower rung of the banister. Ironhide?

The battle still raged on two of the screens.  Not everyone was dead. Not everyone.

But only two positions on the ground were firing. Kim wanted to close her eyes. But that would be a betrayal, wouldn’t it? To admit even to herself that her friends had no chance? They were good at this. So, so good at this. Surely, she had to believe they would win?

Ironhide was no longer transmitting. That did not mean he was dead.

Kim looked down at the assembly area.  Ratchet was standing motionless beside the tunnel entrance, his optics clearly unfocused even at this distance. Surely, if Ironhide were dead, he would be…surely he would be crying.

Abruptly, the streaks of light stopped. There was a small fire—partly obscured by its own smoke on one screen, a swirl of strange colors on the other—but no more flashes or streaks that marked ordinance. Kim frowned, leaning hard against the railing. Was it over?

A point of color in the center of the infrared display blossomed into a wave that blotted nearly everything else out.

***

It was Blur who told her what had happened. He was still in the infirmary, hooked to supplementary energon and hosting a sub-colony of Ratchet’s special nanites because his protomatter had gotten a very hefty dose of whatever the poison was in Dark Energon.

Cliffjumper was dead.

Two humans were badly injured. Kim didn’t recognize the names, and she felt bad about that. It wasn’t right, surely, that she was paying so little attention to the humans who fought beside her informants.

Two of the Decepticons had made it into the mine. Ironhide had brought it down on them. They were buried with the energon and probably dead, but in the morning humans and the three minicons would start searching the nearby shafts.

Slipstream and Jetstorm and Fixit were already on a cargo jet, heading to Tennessee.

Ironhide and Hound had only superficial injuries. They were working to bring the fires under control. Blur was clearly freaked out by how well fire flourished in Earth’s high-oxygen atmosphere. Fortunately, there was frequent rain in the southern mountains during the summer— “Not that that isn’t sort of terrifying itself, actual _dihydrogen monoxide_ falling out of the sky! I mean, not just a few drops or a mist now and then, but enough for actual accumulation—wait, there is a linguistic reference to cats and dogs also falling out of the sky—oh, I see that is a metaphor, never mind. Well, no, Slipstream brought his cat specimen down to visit me this afternoon when I was bored. I can’t imagine a meteorological event _that_ would be that would be a good symbol for. But anyway, it helps, because without the rain I guess everything on this planet would be on fire all the time. Of course, all that water raises the risk of oxidation. We have to watch every injury, Ratchet says, just in case. Iron oxide is the pit.”

Kim could not bring herself to focus on this probably very revealing digression. “What about Bulkhead? And Wheeljack?” She was dizzy with relief that Ironhide was all right, but there were so many, _many_ other people to worry about.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Oh, I keep forgetting. You seem so much like a real person I forget you don’t hear radio. They got the dark energon. It’s risky. They didn’t want to move it until it had cooled properly, and it was all secured in its polymer insulation. I think they’ll be okay though.  Wheeljack, as usual, had totally overengineered the thing. Anyway, they’ve invoked a Wrecker protocol _0_ 린αๆ. They’re on radio silence taking a circuitous route back to base. We know they got away, but not precisely where they are. But that’s all right. I’m sure they’ll be fine. I mean, what can happen?”

 

Although she had found the company as reassuring as the information, Blur was scheduled for a shut down. His spark graph was ragged and continually changing, so there was no doubt he needed it.

 

Unready to go to sleep herself, Kim paced the half mile between the ‘Bot commissary and the (dark and empty) bridge station. Sometimes mecha—busy, distracted,  unhappy—buzzed past her. It was two a.m. before exhaustion overrode her misery and Kim headed to bed.

 

 **Chapter** **17**

 

She woke a little before seven. Still tired but prodded by sadness and dread, she got up and started to dress—and realized she had no idea if she should wear black or not.

 

Cliffjumper was dead. Kim had a black tee shirt, very informal and also very dull.  Or a new black tank with a scattering of sequins, and they normally approved of shiny. But they were mourning.

 

What would black mean to them?  There hadn’t been time to talk much about color symbolism. If there was any color symbolism in play today, what were the odds that black would be the right color to pick? Even assuming that appearance was a symbolic communication of _that_ sort of thing, which it surely wasn’t, since ‘Bots changed their appearance according to activity, not mood.

 _Fuck. What a stupid thing to be stuck on_.

The black shirt with sparkles and her black jeans.  And she could creep out to the edge of the balcony and see if, in fact, anyone else was looking differently today. Just in case. 

When she came out of the inner hallway, though, Optimus was waiting at the railing, staring at the door, so there was no chance of sneaking back to change. Whoops.

Biting her lip, she crossed the balcony without slowing. She could not say good morning. Not today. And—oh, god, faced with him she wanted to cry, but no, she could not do that either. She stopped at the edge, laid a sweaty hand on the old railing, looked up at him.

He looked down at her. “You are distressed,” he said quietly. “According to your phone’s activity log, you have had less than five hours of sleep. If you are unable to work….”

Kim shook her head firmly and he trailed off. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“Your difficulty with written English…?”

Kim hadn’t even thought of that today. _I’ll have to make field notes on Cliffjumper’s death_. She swallowed hard. _Eventually. Not now_. “I’m sure it’s fine. It’s normal.”

He looked at her doubtfully.

Kim lifted her chin. “Raf’s been speaking Cybertronix for months, right? He’s fine.”

The doubtful look hardened. “Rafael…is much younger than you are. His experience may not serve as a useful model for yours.”

“He’s younger, and he’s a genius, and I’ll never be as good as him. But he’s still human. He did it and so can I.”  

“You will keep me informed.”

Kim sighed. “Sure.”

“Thank you.”

She took a deep breath. “Is it--? Um, Cliffjumper?”

“He is dead.”

Kim swallowed hard. “I’m very—I’m so—” she mustn’t say _I’m sorry_ , but she could not remember what she should say instead.

“I also. Kim. Are you able to honor his memory with service? Ah. There is no equivalent English idiom. I apologize, but I must ask….”

Kim’s eyes were wet. She scrubbed the heels of her hands over them and took a deep breath. “Anything. Of course. What…?” Anything.

“Wheeljack and Bulkhead managed to escape with the dark energon. The protocol they assumed requires complete radio and ansible silence and a first-degree randomized travel path.”

Kim nodded to show she was paying attention. “Will they be able to stay hidden from the Decepticons?”

“Easily, even with their point of origin known. However, they have not stayed hidden from us.”

Now Kim was lost. “Oh. Um. How?”

“They have been making purchases on Bulkhead’s credit card.”

Kim choked on a single, painful, startled laugh. “Brilliant!”

“Puzzling. If you will check your phone--?”  

Frowning at this new worry, Kim produced her phone.

Trenton, Georgia, 11:47 p.m. (what time zone was Georgia?), McDonalds, $7.58. That was a #1 meal.

Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, 3:02 a.m., a Seven-Eleven, Swedish fish and Mountain Dew and misc, $25.56.

Friendship, Tennessee, 5: 28 a.m., Exxon, more Mountain Dew, Donuts, and a phone with prepaid minutes. $334.73. 

A phone?  “They’re…sending you a message?”

“That would be clever, but no,” Optimus answered. “If he were communicating, useful information would be encoded in the prices of the items.”

“Oh.”

“In any case, we know their destination. Attempting to communicate would be taking an unacceptable risk.”

“The phone,” Kim began, before remembering that while a human phone would be perfect for monitoring mass media, Bulkhead had no way to enter a gas station to receive his purchases. “He’s traveling with a human.”

“That is our conclusion,” he agreed. 

“One of the NEST guys?”

Optimus shook his head. “They are all accounted for.”

Oh, scrap. “A civilian?”

“That is the obvious conclusion.”

“Oh. Shit. Wait, have there been any missing persons reported?”

“None that meet even our broad search parameters.” His hydraulic fluid swished softly, the only sign of restlessness. “My primary concern is when to alert NEST.”

Kim winced. “Will they be following Bulkhead’s credit card?”

“If they think of it, they may.”

“How long before they get here?”

“Unknown. They are traveling indirectly.”

“Ugh!”

“Agreed.”

Kim ran a hand through her short hair. “How did the Decepticons find the work site? Are our communications, um, I mean do they…?”

“Almost certainly, our communications systems are not breached; our base here has not been attacked.”

Kim gulped silently.

“Our hardline communications are secure, and we had set up a relay station. It is likely the work site was located because the Decepticons were specifically searching for dark energon. They may have detected it as soon as we brought it out of the mine.”

“That’s…not good news, is it?”

“No. We will have to consider carefully how to shield future samples before extraction. Perhaps polymer resin imbedded with silicon.” He paused. “But humans have a saying: hindsight is 20/20. We must deal with the current complication. The best compromise might be to recall Agent Fowler, since the…passenger is civilian and not military.”

Kim pictured Bill Fowler, General Morshower, and Mr. Keller in succession. She looked at the receipts still displayed on her phone.  “Yeah. Fowler. Definitely.”

She was too nervous about the mystery human to actually focus on field notes, so she spent most of the morning on the couch playing guess-this-sound on the phoneme app. She checked Max’s food and water. She stopped by to see Blur, but he was off-line.  She went to lunch, but there was no math lesson with Fixit—he was on his way to Tennessee. Minicons were small enough to fit in human mines.

Slipstream and Jetstorm would be fine. Of course they would.  They were combat ‘Bots.  Fixit….

_Please let him be okay._

Hound and Ironhide arrived in mid-afternoon.  They had traveled by cargo plane to Nellis and then rode up on a flatbed truck to Jasper, Ironhide under a tarp because he’d blown the circuits in his knee joint badly enough to make transforming impossible. He had come home walking up the tunnel in root form, Hound following (also on foot out of solidarity.) They were both dented and most of the paint was scraped off of Hound’s left arm.

June and Dr. Nomura were both at Nellis trying to figure out how the dark energon had hurt Ford. Epps was still deployed in Tennessee. That just left Carly and Pierre to help Ratchet with his patients.  Kim remembered that patients liked someone to talk to during procedures, but this wasn’t like other days. Nobody was talking, except for Ratchet giving instructions and trainees obeying. Cliffjumper was dead. What was there to say about anything?

Kim climbed up onto one of the tables overlooking the medical berths, but she didn’t take notes and she didn’t ask questions.

Ratchet disassembled most of Ironhide’s left knee, dividing the parts into piles for ‘salvageable’ and ‘trash.’ When the Prime arrived he said, “Right now, the best I can do is a temporary fix.  I’ve got nothing compatible in storage.  If it’s going to hold up to any strain at all, we’ll have to make the part from scratch.”

Optimus paused close beside Hound then moved into Ironhide’s overlapping range. “The schedule…can be adjusted.” He glanced at Ironhide. “If you tell me that is the best decision.”

“Pit. No. We got to have a functional bridge, and we got to have a functional subspace technician. Fixit has to go first.”

“Agreed. I…am sorry, my friend.”

“Aw, I got to stick to ranged weapons, that’s all. Like those better anyway.”

Optimus shifted unhappily. Carly, who had been trying to prize out a rock that had gotten jammed in Ironhide’s ped, reached out and patted his ankle. Kim looked away.

Pierre, who had been using a thick paintbrush to apply raw materials gel to Hound’s armor gouges, said suddenly, “Ratchet? This cable is cut nearly through.”

Heavily, Ratchet turned toward him. “Let me take a look.”

“Kim? A word, if you have a moment?”

Kim nodded and stood up, so he could lift her from the table. He did not speak again until they were in the mech commissary. “If they maintain their current progress, they will arrive here between seven and nine-thirty tomorrow morning.”

Kim got out her phone. Salina, Kansas: McDonalds again, something called Ben Franklin, and a thrift store. “Well,” she said. “They still have the human.”

“There has been some information on that front,” he said. “Two missing persons from the Marion County area have been identified.” The image on her phone changed. Two photographs: one an elderly man labeled ‘silver alert’ and the name James Robert Walton; the other an Asian and young, labeled Miko Nakadai.

Kim bit her lip. “NEST doesn’t know?”

“Since no one has arrived to yell at me, it appears not.  Agent Fowler will be landing at five-seventeen this evening. I will meet his plane and explain the situation.  What little we know of it.”

“It might not even be one of these people. Oh, this is _so_ much worse than the alligator.”

“Indeed.”

Wheeljack might not know any better—and had no interest in humans anyway. But Bulkhead—“What can he have been thinking?”

“That a human had somehow entered the combat area and was endangered. Or perhaps that they had been seen  by a civilian and their ‘cover was blown.’”

“So they kidnapped a human? What are we going to do?”

“It is what your government would prefer to do that worries me, Kim. The human—however he or she got involved—is not at fault.”

Kim swallowed. “Well. A nondisclosure contract.  I mean.  And—we have a budget, right? We could—well, you could—pay off whoever it is. Right?”

“That is a possibility. I would be more confident, however, if the candidates were not a mentally compromised individual and a minor.”

“Damn.” Kim looped an arm around his thumb and hugged it.  There was no give at all, and her shirt got snagged, briefly, on one of the joints. Not satisfying. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes.”

“How are things going in Tennessee?”

“No movement has been detected underground. Preliminary survey indicates the collapse goes back more than seventy meters. At this time, the area is not stable enough to permit retrieval of the remaining energon in the collapsed shaft.”

Energon. Always energon. “I’m sorry.”

 _Tik-aa_. Kim tried to match symbols to the sound, failed. Optimus was continuing in English, “The good news is, there is likely to be more energon.”

Which they would have to fight the Decepticons for. But Kim would not say that. “Listen, um. I haven’t. I don’t have a lot of experience with knowing people who died. It’s polite to extend condolences. To say...something. But nothing I can think of to say seems like…enough.”

“To speak when the subject cannot be articulated is empty,” he said. It sounded like an agreement. Or maybe an indictment.

“Not to acknowledge such a…terrible loss,” Kim’s eyes blurred and she had to swallow. She had not liked Cliffjumper. And still, still his loss was terrible. “It would be cruel or disrespectful, to say nothing.”

His fingers closed around her. It was like the safety bars on a particularly extreme carnival ride—thick metal bands from her knees almost to her shoulders. _Hugging really just does not work._

“Your compassion does you credit. I am not sure how to explain—I cannot properly accept it. I am running tactical subroutines which preclude—but this will seem disrespectful to you.”

“You are not letting yourself grieve.”

“There are too many people—both NEST and Autobot—still exposed.”

Kim exhaled hard. “That…would be awful, if you were human.” 

“It is awful by my own standards. But it is necessary.”

“So…not now.”

“Not now, my friend.”

“Am I making this worse?”

“No.”

A transparent lie gave offense. But she wasn’t going to call him on it. “Okay. I should. I should get back to work.”

***

Kim went to bed early. It was a retreat.  While she was asleep, she wasn’t messing anything up.

She was wide awake again at five, unable to stop thinking about—everything. She drew out the Cybetronix alphabet. Over and over. The shape of sound. Although, to her informants, the shape of a sound was documented in a vibrational sonograph thing.

Never mind. Drawing the characters filled the time.

At five of seven she left the old Cold War corridor.  In the assembly area, at the bottom of the stairs, Bill Fowler had set up a card table and folding chairs. There was a box of—“Are those donuts?” Kim asked, taking a seat.

“Got it in one,” he said sourly.

“Are they for us, or whoever is riding with Bulkhead?”

He sighed. “Have a donut. We have about twenty minutes.”

“Do we know--?”

He scowled. “Nope.” His eyes were on the tunnel entrance.

“Do we have a plan?”

“Well, I thought you’d play bad cop.”

“I appreciate the lack of type-casting, but if a little old man starts to cry at me, I’m going to cave. I have no poker face.”

Fowler snorted, and then, reluctantly, offered a brief smile. “If there’s crying, I’m turning this whole disaster over to you.”

Kim started to answer—the interruption was a relief, actually, because what kind of response was there to that?—but Bumblebee walked in and Fowler jumped to his feet. “Oh, _hell_ no! You get in alt right now! On the off chance the human stowaway hasn’t seen the whole giant robot dog-and-pony show, we aren’t going to give them an eyeful of you, standing there like a refugee from ‘Godzilla Fights the Robot Monster.’”

Looking sheepish, Bee quickly folded himself into an innocent-looking yellow Volkswagen. Approaching from the other side, Optimus asked, “How likely is that outcome, Agent Fowler?”

He sagged visibly. “Since we’re dealing with Bulkhead? Pretty small. Humor me anyway.”

 _No really, nothing interesting or extra-terrestrial here. Just a talking car. Forget the whole thing._ Kim smothered a giggle. Optimus, slowly, each movement dripping with dubious tolerance,  changed into a big rig.

Fowler’s phone beeped, and he glanced at it. “They just left the main road. Showtime.”

Ratchet, already in ambulance form—Kim rarely saw his alt, he didn’t go out much—pulled up and parked beside the tunnel mouth. A small antenna dish had sprouted from his front grill. Right. Yes. Because if things weren’t fraught enough, the little convoy was carrying just over twenty pounds of dark energon.

Fowler’s phone beeped again. “And…Mr. Walton was just located trying to…illegally enter a jazz club in Chattanooga.”

So. The teenager. Kim wiped her sweaty hands on her knees and had another donut.

***

Bulkhead exited the tunnel first. He pulled to the side and stopped abruptly, confronted with three watching mecha and Fowler’s cozy little table.

Kim glanced at her phone. There were glyphs flying back and forth on the public channel, but none of them seemed to be ones that were already translated. After only a few seconds, Bulkhead shouted “Hey, wait!” in English, but his door was already open, and a teenaged Japanese girl was leaping out.

“Wow!” she said as her feet hit the ground. “Is this more of them?” She pointed at Optimus and Bumblebee. “Do you turn into giant robots, too?”

Fowler sighed.

Grumbling to himself, Ratchet transformed and waved an impatient hand at Wheeljack, who opened his rear hatch.

“Oh, wow! That is so cool! Are you seriously an _ambulance_?”

Ratchet paused. “No. I’m humorously an ambulance.” He glared at Fowler. “Sort out this larva or whatever. I’m busy.” He began carefully unloading plastic-wrapped coolers from Wheeljack’s trunk area.

“Excuse me!” the teenager said indignantly. “Who are you calling larva?”

Optimus transformed. Of course, the girl immediately stopped pestering Ratchet and stared. He leaned down, his head tilted for sonar and electromagnet scans.  Confronted with his enormous size and focused attention, she retreated closer to Kim and Fowler. “The adolescent seems to be healthy and unharmed. Her parameters are a match for the missing Ms. Nakadai.”

“Yeah,” Fowler muttered. “I noticed.”

“Why don’t you sit down,” Kim said. “Have a donut.”

She eyed the donuts with suspicion. “This is a great secret base, and all. Really cool! But are you going to poison me with the donuts?”

Fowler narrowed his eyes. “That depends. Are you going to sign our nondisclosure agreement?”

“Not funny, Bill,” Kim said. “Is that your version of ‘good cop?’ Ignore him. I’m pretty sure it would be an international incident if we killed a foreign exchange student.”

“How about we arrest her for grand theft auto?”

“Hey! They kidnapped _me_! It isn’t like they would let me even drive! And how is that fair?”

“Now, wait a minute,” Bulkhead said, transforming. “We didn’t kidnap anybody. We just—we _rescued_ her. She was watching, you know, when we were packing up the samples. And. Uh. Then there were Decepticons everywhere and explosions and everybody knows humans are really fragile.” He produced a single, lumpy, plastic package from nowhere and handed it over to Ratchet.

“Perhaps you would care to explain,” Optimus said, “how she managed to breach site security?”

“That was me,” Wheeljack said. He actually sounded slightly subdued. “I was monitoring the sensors on the north end of things. I thought she was a bear until she turned on her phone…and then it was too late.”

“Wait. You thought I was a _bear_? Seriously?”

“A small bear.”

“To be fair,” Bulkhead interrupted meekly, “When you first land here all organic life looks alike.”

Ratchet snorted.

Optimus and Fowler looked at each other for a long moment.

Fowler sighed. “There is only one relevant question, Miss Nakadai, are you going to keep the secret?”

She blinked. “What secret?”

Fowler took a single step closer and looked pointedly down at her. In a cavernous missile silo with five Autobots standing around in root form, the attempt to use his height for intimidation failed pathetically. “The…giant, alien robots.”

She picked up a donut. “That depends. Are you going to make me go home to Tokyo?”

“That’s…negotiable,” Fowler said neutrally.

“I don’t want to go back to Whitwell, either.”

“What do you want?”

Miko looked over at Bulkhead and Wheeljack, who were now both standing meekly in front of Optimus. “I want to stay here.”

The next problem was the skype call to the parents in Tokyo. Fowler and Miko constructed a ‘story’ that was more or less the truth, but with all references to alien attacks and giant robots removed. “If you cross the line,” Fowler said, “I’ll have your butt on a plane to Japan so fast your head will spin.”

“Well, okay. But how would you know?”

“All the ‘Bots speak Japanese.”

“Oh.”

~TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So first, I may not post for a while--I'm out of town next week. Sorry 
> 
> Also--I lost three weeks of editing. The original was...well, I could locate it. But all the fixes, all the additions, all the clarifications Martha pointed out it needed. Yeah. Replacing those now. 
> 
> Finally--I got 14 comments on the last chapter. I used to read notes by authors who said they had 'too many comments to reply individually to' and think 'wow, they must be really busy.' But now I see that no, it isn't about being busy. It is about realizing that a shocking number of people are paying attention and kindly commenting and *you have nothing original or gracious to say that is worthy of their generous attention.*
> 
> I usually write in more obscure fandom with a smaller audience. I am--sadly--not prepared for crafting an adequate thank you for the support and encouragement I have received.


	10. Cantation

**Chapter 18**

Kim lost the next few days to watching the teenager. Everyone else was busy—which also meant no one would have had time for interviews or language lessons anyway.

For her part, Miko put forth some effort into being polite about how uncool and boring Kim was. A truly generous and noble effort.

Kim hoped she had the maturity and commitment to politeness to keep her own disinterest hidden. Miko was surely nice enough, but she was so boringly _human_. She talked about mecha a lot, which helped. Some. It would have helped more if her observations hadn’t been superficial and repetitive. And if she hadn’t been so fascinated with the combat she had seen.  She repeatedly described explosions and tearing metal and a Decepticon Ironhide had ripped in half.

“How did you even get there?” Kim asked, desperate to derail the description. “They had guards up. Scanners and…things.”

Miko snorted. “Yeah, on the road. And they shut down that part of the park. So what? At home we have _haunted_ forests. What is a little walk in the woods?”

“But—what if it _had_ been toxic waste! You could have walked into something that would give you cancer!”  The irrationality made Kim gape. 

It was probably Fowler who had the worst of it. The part of the State Department that handled exchange students was not the part of the State Department that knew about giant alien robots. By all accounts, trying to smooth things over and transfer the exchanged student in question from Tennessee to Nevada wasn’t pretty.

Maggie returned from Maryland. She was disappointed to find Fixit had been deployed to southeast Tennessee. But the surge-protector-thingys had finished baking in the magic nanite oven and it was time to get serious about finishing the bridge rebuild so they could start testing, so she got to work without complaint.

It was horrible and tedious, but Kim didn’t dare turn her back on Miko. The kid wandered. She kept wanting to explore the warrens under the mesa—and she had already proven she had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. 

Sometimes she drew pictures on Kim’s supply of computer paper. They were mostly of Bulkhead, but some were of Wheeljack or Ratchet. Sometimes she played really awful music on the phone they had bought on the way. Frequently, she wanted to go down and watch Bulkhead and Wheeljack work on the bridge. And one day Bee, needing an excuse to steal a few minutes to visit Raf, dropped Kim and the teenager off at the Something-Mart for general shopping.

Every day there was cat maintenance on Max and fussy emails from Slipstream. Miko wanted to know why the cat didn’t have a proper youtube channel or instragram account. Then she wanted to start one, but Kim cleverly pointed out that that was surely the prerogative of Max’s owner. Miko conceded that was true and demanded Slipstream’s cell number so she could call him up and offer to help him with it.

Thinking about the long game, it occurred to Kim that in about four years Miko would be an adult. If she kept her enthusiasm for the ‘Bots, Fowler could put her on the payroll as public relations staff. Sooner or later they were going to need it.

Kim, when she could, practiced with the language app. Her scores slowly climbed to 94%.

And under all the tedious horror of watching Miko and feeding the cat and memorizing alien phonemes Kim was holding her breath for the next alarm. Anything could go wrong in Tennessee. But the Decepticons were quiet, and worry soured into frustration and boredom.

***

It was a Tuesday morning when Kim happily handed Miko over to Bill. They had fast-tracked the family of one of the NEST clerks as hosts in the exchange program so she could stay in Jasper. The moment of disorientation that followed Miko departure was quickly replaced by relief. According to the schedule, all the action was at the ground bridge, which was had just started the testing phase.

Wheeljack, Optimus, Chromia, and Ratchet were parked in alt, filling nearly half the tunnel space. There were five human techs at the gate controls. They all stood with their arms folded (except for one who was taking notes), staring at the console as little lights blinked on and off. The ring of the bridge itself sometimes flickered briefly. 

And that was it. Kim watched for several minutes sure that at any second it would get more exciting. It didn’t. The lights blinked on and off. The mecha didn’t move. Kim checked her phone, but there was no glyph traffic.

Optimus’s passenger door opened.  Kim looked around, but she was the only human not working at the gate controls.  She climbed in. “How is the bridge?”

A pause. “Better this time.” Another pause. “Wheeljack improved the power curve considerably.”

“When will it be open for business?”

“We expect to start…bringing teams back tomorrow.” He shifted slightly on his axels. “The first order of business is getting the orbital network repaired.”

“This will reach space?” Kim asked, surprised.

It was several seconds before he answered. “Yes.”

“You don’t have the bandwidth for this conversation, do you?” Kim asked nervously. This was not the sort of project it would be safe to distract him from.

“No.” A short silence. “Unfortunately.”

“That’s okay. I’ll get out of your way.” She reached for the door handle. It didn’t move when she tugged it.

“We need to speak. In some detail. Before tomorrow afternoon. I will--One moment.”

Kim closed her eyes. How much data was he sorting? And he wasn’t alone. The bridge tests were tying up the multitasking channels of four healthy mecha.

Well. No wonder they weren’t worried about humans getting too close a look at this technology. Human computers couldn’t keep up. They could never replicate it alone. 

“I will make room in the schedule.”

Kim patted the dash. “Any time is fine.”

***

She put Max in her harness and took her down to visit Blur. As rich—as completely indulgent—an environment the cat habitat was, isolation counted as animal abuse. And poor kitty needed to remember she belonged with mecha.

Blur…seemed a little better. He wasn’t attached to any wires or tubes. He was still in the infirmary and his movements were unusually measured and careful. With a single broad digit, he petted Max’s soft, white belly. “Mammals have fur,” he observed. “It must be complicated to keep clean.” He gently examined the tip of Max’s tail.

“We have ways,” Kim said, caught off guard.

“How did she decide on the color?”

Kim blinked. “It’s genetics and uterine environment for cats. I think.”

He glanced at Kim and away. “Oh.” He glanced at her again.  It was an unusually long silence for him.

“Are you looking up mammal reproduction?”

“I thought the thing with the eggs was gross, but—do you know what a placenta is?” At Kim’s nod he shuddered. The gesture looked so natural and spontaneous that Kim could scarcely believe that a month ago he’d never even seen a human before.

Blur was a talker. Kim was happy to have something to take notes on. Max was (apparently) happy to have a mech to pet her again.

Blur described his trip with Cliffjumper and Ford. They’d taken a more or less direct route down to Florida, and then taken a search sweep through the Florida Keys.  Cliffjumper and Ford had both quite enjoyed it. To Blur, it had been an endlessly surprising and incomprehensible alien environment. How could a planet have so much salt water and sand? And why, if it existed, wouldn’t you clean it up and properly pave over it?

And unlike interstate highways, Florida had been full of naked humans. Humans walking around without metal structures around them all the time! Once, they had stopped to spend the night in a motel parking lot because Ford was inside showering and sleeping in a nest because humans had to shut down so often, and some strange human had touched him. Just walked up and set their bag or pouch-thin on Blur’s hood while searching through it.

Blur had been so freaked out he’d started to build up heat, and alt forms aren’t designed to disperse heat when they weren’t moving, so Cliffjumper had had to try to talk him down. “He didn’t like me very much, I think. Cliffjumper didn’t. I can kind of see why—I’m not a tranquil mech even when I’m not on a weird alien planet. And Cliffjumper had been here for a really long time. It wasn’t new to him.  He said Europe was nicer. Much more civilized. That’s were he was before, when he was still searching for Sentinel Prime and the Allspark. The other great landmass. I have to respect him, so many years isolated in such a strange place, the only company or backup another scout separated by a huge, poisonous ocean.”

“Um, it’s not actually poisonous. You’re all submersible. Ratchet showed us the way inner seals work.”

“You’d think I’d find that reassuring, wouldn’t you? Or maybe not. You’re designed as an external seal to keep salt water in. Do you worry about it going the other way? Do you worry about leaking?”

Kim frowned. “Well. I worry about getting punctured. If that’s what you mean. Tiny ones happen several times a year. Human self-repair systems are excellent, though.”

“Ford has been released from the hospital,” it was not a complete change of topic, but Kim had to scramble to keep up. “He has been placed on recovery leave for a month. And he will be observed. I thought the oceans were appalling. But there is dark energon here too.”

“You seem to be really stressed out.”

“’Stressed out.’ Yes. Stressed out. An excellent idiom. Decepticons and salt water and dark energon and Cliffjumper has been killed. Stressed, stressed, stressed out. Metal fatigue. Torsion. Yes.”

Kim winced inwardly. She should not have let the conversation dig so far down into the morass of things that freaked out Blur. “There are lots of places to patrol that are inland. Deserts, even. And very high mountains with low atmospheric density.”

He began listing off and discussing the pros and cons of different deserts. He liked the Gobi for size, but there was too much sand. The Kalahari had plants to keep down the dust storms, and so little rain that it wouldn’t be inconvenient to avoid that. Most of the country of Peru was ideal, except for that horrible, long coastline.

He went on like that for quite a while. Kim took notes, although she wasn’t sure how idiosyncratic his preferences were….

Optimus had pushed Nautilator down the beach toward the water. He had ended up with sand packed in his joints and shutting down his coolant system. So much salt coated everything he had to be decontaminated, and despite the best treatment the infirmary could manage, a fan bracket had rusted through.

It highlighted how desperate things were—not just a spooky, haunted-house of a planet, but covered in physical hazards and troublesome irritants. But somehow the rest of the universe must be worse, because Optimus had been committed to staying even before they found out they would have to fight Megatron for it.

And us? Creepy (revolting?) bags of salt water that barely have a language and struggle with basic math?

***

No longer needed by Ford at Nellis, June and Dr. Nomura were back in the infirmary. Ratchet had them examine Blur and compile an assessment. Kim returned Max to her room and then climbed up on the berth to sit beside the patient.  In between questions from June about his status and error messages, they discussed Earth auto racing.  Blur had not patience for the ostentation of Nascar, preferring instead Grand Prix.

Kim didn’t know anything about motor sports. She’d asked about it early on—they were cars, sometimes, after all--but most of the ‘Bots thought human technology was amusingly primitive.

 

***

The schedule produced a time for her interview with Optimus: six-fifteen in the morning. Kim blinked at and checked the master duty-roster.

Yep. Six-fifteen in the morning.

Well, it would be cool, then, anyway.  July in Nevada was ungodly hot.

**Chapter Nineteen**

As it turned out, dawn in Nevada in July was still ungodly hot.

Kim was ten minutes early. Optimus was in alt parked beside the boulders piled at the southern edge. He didn’t open a door as Kim approached, so she perched on one of the flat rocks to wait and looked out toward Jasper.

The little town looked kind of smudgy and hazy. Traffic coming toward base had already started. Her current view didn’t include the main gate that separated the world of giant aliens and interstellar war from the world of school and church and going-to-work and shopping. Most of Jasper was still asleep, having no idea what it was sitting next to.

At six-fifteen exactly, Optimus unwound into his root form and took a seat on a boulder. “Would you like to be higher?” He held out a hand and Kim accepted the ride to one of the usual niches closer to his eye level. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We have only thirty-three minutes and there is a great deal to discuss.”

Kim leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “What’s up?”

“We expect to begin recalling the Tennessee deployment and the other away teams within the hour.”

Kim nodded. This was on the schedule.

“Assuming the retrieval goes as planned, we will have a great deal to do and only limited time. Tomorrow night we begin deploying patrol teams. Before then…. There will be debriefings. They take much longer when humans are involved.” He gave her an apologetic look.   “Ratchet has a list of minor repairs on returning personnel. We must secure geological samples.” He glanced away. “And the memorial services for Cliffjumper.”

Kim swallowed hard. “Oh.”

“Once we start deploying patrol and survey teams, it may be a very long time before all the mecha on Earth are gathered here together again.”

“I see.”

“Do you? There are so few of us, and so much to be done.” He sighed. “The humans will hold their memorial service for Cliffjumper at sixteen-hundred. It will be…highly structured. And somewhat impersonal. But it is earnestly and respectfully intended.”

“Well, that’s a ringing endorsement. Optimus, if you don’t want….”

“Do not misunderstand. I very much want the acknowledge of the loss and our grief for it. It is just the ritual itself is particularly…alien.”

“Okay.”

“Our own memorial service will be later in the evening. It is…quite different.”

Kim nodded. She suspected she should be writing this down, but now was not the time.

“The exigencies of war… Before, a funeral would last a full _orn_. Now, only four _joor_. It is pitifully inadequate.”

Four _joor_ was over five hours. Kim winced inwardly. The longest service she had ever attended was an Eastern Orthodox Easter—unless you counted that Santeria— _oooh, dear_. “Am I—uh, do I come to the mech service?”

“Yes, you must. You live within our community. To fail to invite you would be a gross insult. To refuse to come…there would be ugly gossip.”

“Of course I’ll come.” Five hours.  She could do five hours. She just wouldn’t drink anything after noon. No problem. “What, um, do I need to know before? About how to act?”

His head tilted slightly in surprise. “How to act? I see, yes. American funerals can be very complex. But no, you were not particularly close to Cliffjumper. Respectful silence is all that is expected.” Apologetically, he added, “Do not take notes.”

She said, “Okay,” but she didn’t for a moment believe that would be all there was to it.  Informants always forgot to tell you the obvious, didn’t they? Who might have five minutes to give her a quick summary of what was coming? Slipstream, at least. He owed her a favor for petsitting Max—

Optimus continued, “Mirage has requested the rites of Reconciliation and Unification. His assignments have not permitted an opportunity in over five hundred years.  For some, it has been even longer. I must—it would be a great dereliction of duty for me to refuse.” He paused, and Kim nodded encouragingly. “Reconciliation and Unification are not linked to funerary rites and they are not usually held together. However. It may be a long time before we are assembled together again. I have scheduled the Greater Connection between the Army memorial service and our own.”

“Oh,” Kim said. She waited for him to say more, but he just looked at her. Finally, she asked, “Do I…attend? Or not?”

“The road here is unclear,” he admitted at last. “There simply is no precedent.”

“You’ve never had an alien ethnographer before.”

“To my knowledge, there has never been an occasion for an organic to attend at all. Nor anyone who was _incapable_ of participating.”

“Oh. It’s okay. Um. I’d like to. But—there are lines. Some things are open only to initiates. I get it.” Kim fluffed up her sweaty hair and then fiddled with her pen.

“You misunderstand. It is not a question of privacy. The rites are not secret. But how can you observe and analyze what you cannot experience or comprehend? You cannot even describe the event in English.”

Kim scooted closer to the edge of the ledge and leaned forward. “I won’t be offended if you decide I shouldn’t come.”

“It may not happen again for years.”

“Okay, then. I’ll come.” His optics reset. “What? Will the others be offended if I’m there?”

“I am Prime,” he said sternly. “They will not take offense at how I conduct Reconciliation.”

Okay, _that_ was definite. Speaking from the Chair of Peter, are we? But this wasn’t the time to chase that ethnographic rabbit.  “What are you worried about then?”

“It may frighten you. And I will not be able to help you.”

Frighten me? “Wait. Wait. Is this--dangerous? For you?”

“It is somewhat arduous, but no. It is not dangerous. It…involves physical transformations you have not yet seen.   I will शो4*久 _+|+_ θ and ๆα. Forgive me. The English language pack is glitching over the terms.”

Oh, boy. Kim closed her eyes and tried to envision the indescribable. Failed. “Since I can’t transform, will my being there disrupt things? Is it okay for me to just stand out of the way and watch?”

His optics stared, unfocused, past her shoulder. “Aside from quickening and depositing a new spark, this is the most beautiful of our customs. But I am imagining how it will look to you, and…” He shrugged sadly.

“And it will be alien,” Kim said. “Isn’t it nice that I really like studying aliens? If. If you tell me that it’s safe for everyone involved, I’ll…I’ll just believe you. Okay? I…promise, no matter what. I won’t be afraid.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your cooperation.”

Kim looked at him. His optical lenses shifted restlessly, and his fans were high, but his face was blank and his shoulders were perfectly erect. He was omitting the nonverbal protocols. “Hey?” she asked softly. “Are you okay?”

“Ratchet continues to be satisfied with my physical functioning.”

“I’m glad.” But that had not exactly answered her question. “Is there anything I can do to make this all easier for you?”

“It is not supposed to be easy.” And then he spoke—a layering of resonant tones and warm chimes. It would have been a very difficult word to parse, but she had heard it many times before.

“That’s ‘Prime,’” Kim said. She glanced away nervously.

“It is.  I have been thinking about how to explain the Matrix to you.  I am out of time, and still I do not know what to say.”

“You’ve said it stores wisdom. And it kindles sparks.  Also, possibly, a resting place for the souls of the departed?”

“Knowing what it does does not tell you what it is.”

“What is it? Really?”

“Structure. Separate from the information it contains and its functions, the Great Matrix is a structure for organizing information.”

“The memory must be huge, then? Quartz?” 

“Far, far denser than quartz. We call it 久Ш. It is not a substance we know how to manufacture.”

Kim didn’t conceal her surprise. “You’ve lost the technology?” Humans were all tech newbies. They changed data storage systems and apps without translating old files regularly. But that wasn’t a mistake mecha would make, surely.

“We never had it.”

Kim’s breath caught. The possibility was shocking. “Optimus. Who made you? I mean--not _you_ , but—”

“Primus.”

Blinking, Kim digested that. “Is that a metaphor?”

“No.”

“And by Primus, you mean--?”

“The Maker. The Seeker of Knowledge. The Planter.”

“God,” Kim said, her voice hardening through her habitual neutrality and patience. After months of telling her they had no religion—

“No. A being. Ancient. Huge. Divine, yes. But not a god.”

Kim knotted her hands to keep from reaching for her pen. “How ancient? How huge? Um.”

“How old? I estimate nine billion years. How huge? The scale is planetary.” 

“Oh—” Kim chocked back an expletive. _Fuck._ Inappropriate here, if ever. _Dear god._

“And Primus made…mecha. And the Matrix. And the Allspark? And Vector Sigma?”

“Vector Sigma…may be contiguous with Primus.” `

“Contiguous.” _Touching_. Kim closed her eyes. “I don’t…Vector Sigma is on Cybertron.”

“Yes, Kim.”

“Really?” she breathed.

“There is considerable evidence. But not everyone agrees with my conclusions.”

 _Oh, god_. Literally.  “And you have, inside you…?” What? Kim shivered despite the heat.

“The Wisdom of Primus.  The Cradle of Life. The Legacy of the Ancients. The accumulated experience of the line of Primes before me. I am its interface. The Matrix is structure. What it holds is a treasure I cannot describe but must share. Unlike the Allspark, its ability to act independently is limited. Its gifts are accessed through me.”

“Oh. That’s. Are you all right?”

“The Matrix is a blessing. It blesses me first of all.”

Right. But. “Is it…difficult?”

“No. Everything else, so much else. But the Matrix is no burden.”

“I’m not sure what to say. What should I ask?”

“I’m afraid there is no more time just now.”

“Oh,” Kim closed her eyes, exhaling hard. One hand reached out. Even as she remembered and began to pull back, a smooth metal digit brushed against her fingers. She clutched at it. “No, I—"

“Kim.”

“I won’t forget. That you’re you, and not just the interface of God. I won’t—I won’t try to worship you.” Her voice cracked. “I won’t turn into _staff_.”

His hands slid behind her, lifting her into the cup of his palms.  She expected to be lifted toward his face, but no.  Mech intimacy wasn’t mutual eye contact it was overlapping energy fields. He lifted her close against his chest. “My friend. Remember that tonight,” he said softly.

Kim paused for breakfast (cold cereal) before brushing out Max and easing her into her harness so she could go out onto the balcony and wait for Slipstream. The cast would be ready to come off soon. Kim would ask about making an appointment with a vet in town.

When she carried Max out onto the balcony, Agent Fowler was coming up the steps.  “Bulkhead wants to take Miko on patrol with him.”

Kim blinked. “Oh, dear. What does Optimus say?”

“He wanted to know if it qualifies as transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes.”

“Um. I don’t think you can make that case.”

“ _Not_ helpful. Thanks.”

Kim winced sympathetically. “Well, what about Ironhide? He’s the safety expert. If there’s a good reason not to, he’ll think of it.”

He brightened slightly. “You think?”

Kim sighed. “No.  Have you been on patrol with them?” He hadn’t. “It’s driving. On roads. With drivers who never get into accidents. Compared to the planet getting strip-mined into a pool of molten stone…I’ don’t see it.”

“I am so fucked.”

“Right, because having leverage you could use to make Bulkhead behave is exactly _not_ what you wanted.”

“I really don’t think that outweighs—how emotionally invested is he in this kid?”

“I dunno. He was pretty bored, before. And then there’s Wheeljack.  He had zero interest in humans. But he talks to Miko.”

“Hm. Damn.  Wheeljack is going to spend most of the next month in orbit, cleaning out communications satellites and getting them back on line.”

Kim made a face. “I think it is fair to request that Miko not be removed from the continental United States. So. There’s that.”

“So fucked.”

“And give her a phone the ‘Bots control.”

“No kidding.” He grimaced. “Last time I come to you for help.”

“You’re welcome,” Kim said.

***

Slipstream arrived in his spherical alt, rolling out of the tunnel like a huge red and black grounder.  He transformed so fast he fell over and nearly tripped on the first step up the stairs. It wasn’t clumsiness so much as sheer abandonment of dignity—the first careless motion she’d seen from either of Drift’s students.

He remembered his manners at the top of the stairs. “Thank  you with the most earnest and spark-blossoming gratitude. You have saved me from being derelict in my duty to Max.”

“You’re welcome—“ Kim began, but he had already scooped up Max, _trills_ and _clicks_ mixed in with “Who’s a good kitty? yes, yes.” Kim swallowed a laugh and headed down the stairs.

She walked carefully, close to the wall.  Returning mecha were bustling through the assembly area, some of them in alt. Strongarm was filthy, actually shedding flakes of dried mud. Ironhide was helping Drift unpack and sort boxes from his subspace.

In the infirmary, Springer was cradled on a medical berth, connected to the monitor bank with a thick cable.  Ratchet was growling at him in Cybertronix. Well. He had flown out against medical advice. Ratchet might have every reason to be pissed at him.

Windblade was—disconcertingly—splayed out on the spongy surface of an active pallet, half-transformed. Carly and Dr. Nomura seemed to be cleaning dirt and rocks out of her landing gear.  Chromia was seated beside her speaking softly in a mix of Cybertronix and English. The snatch Kim caught walking past sounded like they were discussing American military protocol.

She hadn’t noticed the second medical berth at first because it had been lowered as far as it could go toward the floor. Fixit was sitting perched on the edge. He looked shockingly small on the huge structure. Kim’s foot skittered on the floor as she staggered to a halt. “Fixit! Dude! What happened?” The question was echoing back from across the infirmary before Kim realized it was probably rude and definitely insensitive.

He held up his left hand. Two servos wiggled. The third was slack and—ick!—nearly shorn off.

She jogged under Ratchet’s work table and hopped onto the berth beside him. “Damn! How did that happen?”

“I was in a tunnel. There was a rock.” His antennae shivered. “Do not expend sympathy.  Arcee was there. She disconnected the pain transmission.”

“That’s convenient,” Kim gulped.

“It is. I cannot do that myself.”

Kim pointed vaguely. “What is Ratchet going to do? Does the digit need to be replaced?”

“No. New wires and a spot-weld will take care of it.  First, Pierre will come and clean the surfaces. Pierre is gentle. I always liked working with him.”

“Hm. Yes. He’ll take good care of you. Um. Where’s Maggie?”

“At the bridge. Today is very important.”

Kim glanced at the mangled servo. “Maybe…she could take an early lunch.”

Fixit laid his good hand on Kim’s arm. “Do not go and get Maggie. She is the only human who understands bridge equations. She must stay.”

“You shouldn’t be by yourself.”

His optical lenses—single, broad plates of flexible ‘glass’--dilated and reset. “You think I am alone. You are concerned for me.”

Kim nodded. “Yeah. I know seeing the doctor alone is…something mecha avoid.” She frowned. “Are you not alone? Is someone with you on radio?”

“I am listening to the bridge telemetry on radio.  It is good to be home. I do not like Earth mines.”

Uncertain what to say, Kim just nodded.

“On Earth, do doctors for humans know your name?”

Kim frowned. “Sometimes they just have it on a piece of paper. But some people have regular doctors that know you.”

“Humans go to the doctor alone?”

“Usually, yeah. Medical things are supposed to be….private.” Oh.

“What is it like?”

Kim shrugged. “Scary sometimes. If something might be wrong. Embarrassing—because you’re naked sometimes. And sometimes they judge. They touch you with cold things.”

Fixit snatched back the servo he had let rest against Kim’s arm. Kim’s fingers closed on the empty air. “No, not you. It’s not the same. “

“Maggie said humans do touching.”

“Mammal,” Kim agreed. “We do touching. We can’t do overlapping.”

Fixit sagged in an exaggerated sigh. “Things that are easy to say to other mecha are so hard to say to humans,” he said. “It isn’t just English. The emotional communication is so ambiguous. And there are so many things you _don’t already know_.”

Kim bit her lip. “Well. I want to know everything. But you don’t have to tell me everything right now. Or, you know, ever. I guess all I need to know right now is if you want me to stay with you for the repair.” Pierre was already on his way over with a caddy of mysterious supplies.

Instead of answering, he asked. “Do you fear I am in distress?” At her nod he continued, “I am not. Ratchet knows my name. He cares that I am fully functional and comfortable.  He will not ‘judge.’ Pierre is my friend. He is responsible and personable. Everyone here, I know. Your company would be welcome, but I will not be afraid if you go.”

“How about I stay?”

“Okay.” He lifted his damaged servo. “My pretty new nanite coat is damaged.”

“Meh. You liked the rugged look, anyway. Although you could use a wash. What is that black stuff on the back of your helm?” _Ooops_. Discussing someone’s state of cleanliness was an offer to wash them. 

“Carbon. Apparently, it is used as a fuel source by humans.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“It has a very high waste-to-kilowatt ratio.”

Kim snorted. “Yeah. Compared to energon.” All power was ‘dirty’ compared to energon.

Pierre had tiny brushes and tweezers and wire cutters and a suction hose thinner than a pencil. “Ratchet’s grumpy,” he said, positioning Fixit’s servo between on a strut between them. “It seems the Earth is entirely made of dirt.” 

Fixit nodded. “Nevada is tidier than Tennessee. I liked the trees, though.”

It only took a few minutes to prep Fixit’s servo. Ratchet came over just as Pierre was finishing. He gave Kim a single nod, which she decided to interpret as approval.

With swift, delicate strokes, Ratchet replaced the mangled wires and re-attached the dangling servo. The most complicated part, actually, seemed to be reactivating the servo’s neuro-connections.  He had to have a hard line interface for that. Fixit submitted willingly.

***

Kim spent the bulk of the day washing mecha.

Everyone was in a hurry, and everyone was glad of the help. Even tiny hands were useful.  Some of the mecha hadn’t seen the inside of a washrack in weeks. Water ran in multi-colored trails across the floor—brown and tan, mostly, with some reddish and yellow thrown in. 

The black was coal dust. All the minicons had it in their seams.

The last one in was Arcee. She thanked Kim for the help, but offered nothing else.  There were deep scraps and scuffs in her finish.  Her divided root forms weren’t _quite_ small enough for probing old mine shafts. One scrape on the blue unit’s rear bumper was as large around ask Kim’s palm. “Does this hurt?” she asked, tentatively running the sponge over it.

“It’s only paint.”

Kim winced. “Pretty durable paint,” she muttered, scrubbing at marks that couldn’t wash off.

One of the motorcycles pivoted slightly to look at her. “I turned off my force field—the spaces were just  too small.”

“Arcee, I’m…really sorry for your loss,” Kim whispered.

“Thanks, ЬЬЬЬЬЬ.”

Kim pretended she didn’t know what that meant and kept washing.

***

By the time Arcee was finished, it was time for Kim—chilled, soggy, and pruned—to get ready for the military service. She showered herself and bolted a can of cold ravioli. A small cup of water was…probably okay.  Tea would have been so much better.

She had a black skirt and a dark grey button-down shirt. They were unflattering, but it wasn’t like ‘looks good at a funeral’ had ever been one of her life goals. Her field bag she exchanged for a purse big enough to hold her phone, tissues, and a protein bar. No notebook today. Not for this. Her black shoes (like all her shoes) were flats: this wasn’t the first long religious ritual she had had to stand through.

It would just be the longest. By a lot. Long, and possibly frightening.

Mysterious much, Prime? But that wasn’t fair. He was sixty or seventy tons and taller than a two-story house: lots of innocuous actions would seem scary at that size.

Jazz gave Kim a lift on his shoulder to the assembly area in the NEST staging area. He set her on the gantry with the other humans. It was draped in black. There were chairs.

June was on the gantry, in an army dress uniform instead of scrubs. The other trainees were in a forlorn clump beside Ratchet’s left ped. Kim would have liked that better than the gantry.

It wasn’t a military funeral. In the back of her mind, Kim supposed she had been assuming that it would be.  You saw snatches of those on the news sometimes. But no.  Cliffjumper hadn’t been an American serviceman. And he hadn’t been human. And there wasn’t a body—only some of the pieces had been recovered—and Autobots didn’t inter bodies anyway.

Keller had a short, solemn speech about honoring Cliffjumper’s sacrifice. Mearing was more personal—she had worked with Cliffjumper in Europe and Asia several times, and she shared a personal remembrance—not of something humorous, as was usual in human funerals, but of a clever and patient political maneuvering with some EU officials. Captain Lennox assisted General Morshower in presenting a pair of velvet boxes to Optimus, who, in turn, gravely passed them on to Jazz and Arcee.

I was only then that Kim noticed that Bee was not among the collected mecha. She felt a stab of sympathy—Cliffjumper and Bumblebee had worked together (sort of) on Earth for years. Was the human service just too much for him, emotionally?

Or was something else wrong?

Kim was reaching for her phone before she remembered that the humans present would not think glyphing her concerned question to Fixit was a natural response.

Well, damn. No, couldn’t disrespect the general.

As soon as the memorial ended, Ironhide appeared at the catwalk railing. “You’re to stay with me,” he said.

“Is that okay with you?” She and Ironhide got along very well, but that didn’t mean he wanted to babysit an ethnographer at the funeral of a friend. Or whatever else was happening first.

“It was my idea.” He held his hand out.

**Chapter Twenty-one**

It was hot on the mesa, and the landing pad didn’t have any shade. Bee was waiting by himself. Or, no. His door opened and Raf got out.

Hmmm.

Raf leaned an arm across Bee’s hood in a quick hug and then came over to join Kim where Ironhide was setting her down at the edge of the solar farm. “Hey,” he said nervously.

“Hey,” Kim agreed. “You okay?”

He shrugged, eyes following the slow parade of mecha who were settling in a ring, root forms facing the center.

Kim frowned. “Raf?”

“Bee told me today,” he whispered. “About the Decepticons.”

Kim glanced at Ironhide, but he was focused on the empty center of the circle. “Um. You know all that’s classified, right?”

Raf gave her a bleak look. “I won’t tell.”

Right. He had nobody to talk to about this. Kim knew that asking kids to keep secrets was not good for their mental health. “Is it Bee you’re worried about?” she whispered.

This time he did not bother to add commentary to the bleak look.

Kim nodded. “I am, too.”

After a moment, Raf shifted uncomfortably. “Did you know the one that died?” he whispered. “Cliffjumper?”

Kim nodded.

“Oh.” He shifted a step closer.

The figures arriving and settling on the mesa weren’t talking. They were quieter than a human crowd would be.  Pistons didn’t shift for balance corrections nearly as often as muscles did. No throat clearing. No whispers. The only sounds were the breeze and the ‘shh’ of fans. Kim snuck out her phone for a peek. There was no glyph traffic.

A path had been left open between the freight elevator and the center of the helicopter pad. Optimus was the last to arrive, long strides covering half an acre in a few steps. As he moved through them, the mecha he passed shifted slightly inward, so that the path closed up behind him.  At the center there was some slight shifting again. Kim leaned to the left, peering between legs as thick as trees and saw Chromia and Windblade take up positions before and behind him.

Kim inhaled in surprise. Was this event gendered? Their own genders, not the human approximations they adopted for dealing with NEST? Kim glanced at Ironhide: he was erect and motionless, no expression on his face and no unsettled noises in his internal systems. It wasn’t about rank—Jazz was  senior to Chromia, and he was standing toward the outer edge of the crowd. Ironhide was third in command but standing completely outside the circle, with the two humans. Unless he was standing guard?

Kim put down her purse, rolled her shoulders, and made sure her knees were not locked. Whatever was coming might start any—

The song was so quiet that the sounds slid past Kim’s ear with only a vague, Cybertronix impression. Jazz swayed ever so gently, singing only slightly louder than the breeze whispering in the solar panels. Kim leaned forward, trying to make out the phonemes or recognize even a single word. It sounded like a minor key. It sounded…yearning. Or maybe sad.

Fft. It might be a party song or a heroic ballad. Listening with human assumptions to this alien music would tell her more about herself than about them. Stick to observable facts….

Slowly, by gentle degrees, the song got louder. Kim could hear individual sounds, follow distinct rhythm and pitch. Was this a minor key? She’d had only one class in ethnomusicology. Boris had taught it—he’d been obsessed with Cossack folk music and competitive Native American dance, so not a lot of help there.

Jazz turned slowly, singing to everyone, the song becoming more fluid as it grew a little louder. 

Beside her, Raf whispered. “In separation we know the power of love.  From distance we…something. Oh.” He shuddered slightly. “The loneliness is unbearable. I have lost myself in losing you. me. them.”

Kim glanced at him.  Was he being rude? Should she stop him? But if Ironhide or any of the others noticed the quiet English translation, they gave no sign.

“That which I love, will love, have loved. That which I fail, will fail, have failed—oh.” His eyes widened. “It’s _my most grievous fault_ ….”

Kim’s fingernails dug into her palms. She wasn’t ready to observe this. She didn’t know enough. _Wait. Please. I don’t understand._

The hair on the back of her neck was starting to stand up. Was that an emotional reaction? Or was static electricity picking up?

Jazz was singing out strongly now. Each Cybertronic word was shaped in crystalline wholeness, ringing out across the hot, bright mesa. Another voice joined him. Then several more. They didn’t all seem to be singing the same song—or at least not the same words. The melody twined around a central beat, resonating despite the open air. It was amazing. It was beautiful. 

_Optimus asked me to sing, and I sang him fart songs._

Her eyes prickled, but there was no time for shame and regret. The chorus was changing. She felt, at first, that it was a vibration in the stone. But no, it was her feet that were feeling something under the music.  Something rising.   It surged through her feet, her legs, her spine, and out her ears. A very different song. A major key? A pentatonic scale? Oh, damn it, she hadn’t _known_ she’d need to study music—

It was Optimus. His voice was everywhere, gathering in all the lighter, sadder songs. He called out a chord. A choir of rising mecha voices called back. Again. And again.

Kim’s eyes blurred over. She rubbed the back of her hand across them in time to see Optimus, still singing, fold gracefully into alt. The semi took shape, but the origami folding continued. His cab shifted back. The deck tucked in.

And then—still singing—he unfolded, opening at the top like a flower and peeling back sheets of armor that parted in places Kim would have sworn had no seams. He came apart and came apart and Kim found she couldn’t breathe. Had something gone wrong?

But he was still singing. The stone under her feet throbbed with song.

His armor was a wreckage on the ground, revealing an irregular column of silver and black that gleamed with tiny rainbows. Undifferentiated protomatter, open to the air and unprotected. Kim’s arms curled around her own belly in flinching sympathy.

And he was still singing, calling out to the voices that called back. _He’s all right. He said he’d be all right. Please be all right._

Windblade, standing just behind him, suddenly dropped out of sight. Kim blinked, leaning to the side—and gasped. In her place a glittering sequined dandelion was rising. _Oh._

Chromia’s protomatter poured out on the mesa like iridescent water. Kim hoped it was supposed to do that.

The motion of more than a dozen mecha transforming at once was a dizzying swirl of armor that smelled slightly of warm metal and lubricant. They all kept transforming past their alt forms, some folding down to spheres or cubes before opening back up to expose their inner cores.

The protoforms that were revealed seemed small and fragile, but they unfolded in turn, unwinding up and out like fern leaves or branching trees or dendrites. Still rooted in their carapaces, they uncoiled and reached through the air. It was a shocking thing to do with an internal organ.

Kim frantically prayed that this was what was supposed to be happening.

She had promised not to be afraid.

Ironhide’s hand closed gently around her. He lifted her up and took a step back. Kim was looking down on the stretching rainbows now. Sometimes the fronds touched one another, throwing up little arcs of light before parting. Kim wrapped her arms around one of Ironhide’s fingers and leaned forward. He brought his other hand up. “Take it easy there, kid,” he murmured.

Kim squirmed to look back at him. “Put me down.”

He shook his head. “Just to be safe.”

“Raf is down!” she hissed.

“We think…Raf understands.”

“ _What_?” Kim glanced down. Raf was on his knees, bent forward with his forehead touching the ground. Some fronds of protomatter hovered in the air quite close to him but not touching.

 _Oh, what the actual hell_? He was a minor. For God’s sake—

What did Raf understand? Did speaking the language change you?

The song swelled and flowed around the mesa, and the branching mech bodies swayed and danced. Child or not, Raf had a right to his own spirituality.

Oh. That thought turned Kim back. “Put me down,” she begged. “I’ll stand back. ‘Hide, you can’t miss this!”

His hand tightened slightly around her, and he settled her against his shoulder. “I can’t join this,” he whispered. “I’m still too pissed at Optimus. I can’t forgive him, and joining in would…. I’m not pissed enough to make it hard on him on purpose.” He shook his head sadly.

“Reconciliation,” she said. Her voice didn’t carry over the rising song.

“I just can’t, and that’s all there is to it. Now watch. This may not happen again in your lifetime.” He pointedly turned his hand so she was facing away from him.

Below the tendrils and threads were bending downward, tapping lightly against the ground. They looked curious and playful. The song was shifting, too, becoming lighter and slightly quicker. Optimus’ voice dropped into low, slow chords, calm and reassuring. His silvery form got—impossibly—brighter. Kim’s eyes teared up again, but through the blur she saw kaleidoscopes of color that spread across the gathered mecha and reflected weirdly off the normally transparent camouflage field above them.

She felt the warm, heavy feeling she’d felt before. Now, though, it was clearly _other_.  It was bigger, now, too. Deeper. More intent.

It was curious.

Kim flinched backward until she was pressed against Ironhide’s thumb. She wasn’t ready, this wasn’t a good idea, she would surely be a disappointment—

She wasn’t ready—

Immense and inexorable as the tide going out it receded. Everywhere she looked was a rosy glow, fading now, but lovely to look at and somehow….reassuring.

The song simplified into a soft unison chant. The rainbow cloud of protomatter tendrils was separating and folding back into the open blossom forms. With shimmers and flutters, their closing-up was slower and less graceful than the opening had been. The transformations were slower too, and some, like Slipstream and Strongarm, stayed in alt.

Bumblebee seemed to collect himself first, coming over to crouch beside Raf, his hands flat on the ground beside the little boy’s feet. Raf reached out for him. He could barely get his arms around Bee’s head. Bee was talking softly, but Raf didn’t bother answering.

Chromia came to Ironhide and took a position beside him. Overlapping.

Optimus, moving a little heavily, withdrew to the north edge of the mesa. His head tilted and tilted again, scanning something. Kim wondered what. Hound joined him.

This wasn’t the time to ask. When Ironhide set her down, she retrieved the tissues from her purse and offered them to Raf. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any water.”

He let go of Bumblebee to wipe his face. “’m okay.”

Around them, the mech seemed to be…busy. They were positioning small devices no bigger than a tennis ball on the ground. Sometimes they repositioned them. They hardly spoke aloud, but when Kim checked her phone, there was glyph traffic again.

Optimus returned to the gathering, but he stood at the north edge of it rather than in the middle. At once, everyone finished doing—whatever it was—to the devices and faced him. 

He spoke audibly, but in Cybertronix. Kim was composing herself to look calm and attentive instead of confused and disappointed when Raf said, “I’m, uh, to translate for you. He says, ‘our cries of distress in shared diminishment’—but all in verbs.” He frowned. “Um. ‘We anger. And grieve. But we will act from wise judgement and we must not lose hope. We must persist. We owe it to one another, to our memory of Cybertron, to the scattered and bereft seeking a home, to humankind, and to the memory of our fallen comrade. Beloved, be certain. Be courageous. Be—'”  Raf shook his head, wincing.  “Something. ‘Until all are one.’”

Optimus lifted his hand. A life-size projection of Cliffjumper in alt sprang upward from it.  He crouched and set another of the small devices on the tarmac. All the other devices lit up then, too. Each had a different picture of Cliffjumper. Oh. Kim looked from one to another. Each image was only foreground, so she couldn’t tell what the subject was doing aside from a basic ‘standing’ or ‘transforming’ or ‘jumping.’ Only a few of the alts were Earth vehicles. Two didn’t appear to have wheels of any kind.

Raf tucked his hand into Kim’s. “We should go sit over there,” he said, pointing toward a supply chest at the edge of the solar farm. “They’re going to walk around. It might be rude for them to have to walk over us.”

So, she followed Raf and sat. The ‘Bots meandered slowly through the forest of images, rarely speaking aloud. Sometimes they stopped and stood motionless. Kim settled in and tried to watch them all at once, trying to understand the meaning. Not that she had a notebook, of course. She had her wristwatch, so she could time pauses, but no way to memorize a list of people and times. 

She remembered, with a stab of fondness, a professor from her undergrad days who had described tying knots in the fringe of a shawl so she could keep a discreet count of the sheep individual informants owned.

Kim was far away from all that now. _You didn’t know you were getting me ready to work with aliens._

Ratchet and Arcee seemed to be moving least. There was also the most distance between them and others. Optimus always had at least two other bots standing close to him. Anytime someone approached, he shifted slightly, welcoming them into his overlapping space.

Drift and his students stayed together, every change in position coordinated and smooth.

Chromia stayed with Ironhide. Her posture was erect, movements smooth. Ironhide has his head angled down and was limping on the bad knee. _Fourteen thousand years old_ , Kim thought.

Fixit—timid, careful to get out of everyone else’s way--was shadowing Windblade, who gracefully paused and waited whenever he strayed slightly out of her invisible boundary.

Raf slumped sleepily against Kim’s shoulder. She put an arm around him—a normal, human thing to do.

What a shame hugging didn’t work for bots.

Mirage—moving more quickly than most of the others, he had already admired all of the projections at least twice—passed the spot where the humans were sitting. He turned his head briefly, one of his optical arrays resetting in a slow wink. _Oh, my_ , Kim thought. _Someone is just barely being civil._ Were there any polite ways to find out more about Cliffjumper and Mirage’s mutual dislike? Did Autobots believe it was wrong to speak ill of the dead?

Raf sagged harder and began to snore softly.

***

The sun was fully down when the memorial ended.  Kim’s eyes were gritty, and her butt was numb. The dim light made the images stand out in hyper-saturated 3-D and their glow reflected a weird sparkle here and there a dozen meters overhead: the camouflage field.

With a ‘thank you’ Kim understood, Bee collected Raf and whisked him away while the other were still collecting the projectors. Bulkhead, on his way to the elevator, stopped and frowned in palpable puzzlement. “Your legs aren’t separately encased.” He sounded shocked.

“I’m wearing a skirt, Bulkhead. I know you’ve seen them before.”

“Not on you! You’re not one of those humans.”

“I’m a woman human. Sometimes we wear skirts. Some of us.”

“But you’re not a woman human who fusses about the budget and goes on and on about rules. You never yell about anything. Are you training to work on the gate or something?”

“So…women wear skirts if they’re gate techs or if they’re bureaucrats.”

“Well…yeah.”

“Oh, Bulkhead. You…really don’t know enough humans.”

“Well, I’ve been avoiding the ones in skirts. And the ones in ties.”

I need to write the ‘Bots a pamphlet on clothing. _What is the difference between a wig and a hat?_ Or possibly hold a seminar. “Do you have time to give me a ride downstairs?”

“Sure. I actually have recharge scheduled after this. Tomorrow morning Miko and I are going to patrol in Oklahoma.”

“Wow. That may literally be the most boring place I can think of.”  She assumed Fowler had arranged that on purpose.

“Naw! It’s gonna be superfun. They call it a superfun site, apparently.” He dropped into alt and opened his passenger door.

Kim swallowing dryly—she was tired and thirsty and stiff—and climbed in. “They gave you the assignment over the radio, didn’t they?”

“How did you know?” 

“Superfund,” she accented the ‘d.’

There was a short silence. In a small voice, he asked, “Is it safe to take Miko there?”

Kim had no idea. “What does the EPA say is in it?”

Another pause. “Lead. Cadmium. Zinc.”

Ew. “Don’t let her get out. Hit a carwash before you come home.”

“Yeah….”

“Keep your doors locked. She’s fast.” Kim sighed and leaned back against the soft seat. The truth was Miko was as safe with Bulkhead as…anywhere else in the world, really. A government could freak out and fire nukes at the space invaders tomorrow. Or the dreadnaught in orbit could start raining fire.

_I really should stop thinking about that._

_~tbc_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, Martha. This needed a lot of work. Twice.  
> Thanks, everyone, for all the patience and support.


	11. Ideolect

**Chapter 20**

The morning after Cliffjumper’s memorial Kim had an early appointment with Bee and Hound. They whisked her out to the drainage culvert behind the little strip mall where  Raf was waiting. He sat on a broken wooden box with his toy car in his lap. He didn’t jump up when Bumblebee parked beside him.

Worried—was he pale?—Kim hopped out of hound and came to sit next to him. There wasn’t much room on the box, but he’d fallen asleep on her yesterday. “You okay?”

“Weird dreams all night,” he said. “Really weird.” He took off his glasses and began to wipe them on the tail of his shirt. “Bee says you might need some help sorting out what…went on, and he doesn’t have much time because he’s scheduled to spend the next two weeks in Australia.”

“Oh. Thanks. I didn’t—it’s really kind of you both to help.”

“I’m curious,” Hound said. “Kim, what was your impression of the human memorial service.”

“It was really structured and formal,” she said neutrally. “I can see why you all don’t like it much.”

He shrugged fluidly. “You have very brief lives. I understand why you must so contain your sorrow. It must be overwhelming, to lose so many, so often. To spend so much of your lives in the first, raw flush of grief.”

Kim winced. “I had not thought about it that way.”

Hound and Bumblebee exchanged a look. “And the memorial we held?”

“It was different,” Kim said carefully. “It seemed very…” she searched for a neutral word, “intense, maybe. Or unmediated.” Hound waited for her to go on, but Kim’s response to the rituals she was studying shouldn’t be the focus of too much conversation. “I was curious. There wasn’t speaking aloud. Was there on radio….?”

Bee answered, and Raf translated, “There are no required communications.  If anyone needs to say something to someone or everyone, they may say it. Usually over radio. Sometimes by glyphs.”

“It is a time to mourn together, with others who are mourning,” Hound said.

Kim squared her shoulders. “What happens? After dying?”

The two ‘Bots tipped their heads back in surprise and even Raf frowned at her. “You saw,” Hound said. “As soon as we are able, those who knew him come together to remember and mourn. After that, we must learn to adjust to the loss.”

“No, I mean…What about Cliffjumper? Is there…anything…left? Or….” She really, really wished she had time to think about how much she wished she could avoid this particular question. It was awful, having to ask, but she saw no way to ignore it.

Hound leaned forward interestedly. “You are referring to an afterlife.” He glanced at Bee. “It’s a pattern you sometimes see in sentient organics.”

“Yes, I’m asking about what happens after life. If anything.”

Hound crouched onto his knees and leaned in close, his head level with Kim’s. It was the body language they used when they were trying to be particularly interpersonally available. It signaled both that the topic was complex or emotionally fraught and that an existing personal relationship was being invoked. “Kim, his spark chamber was breached. His containment failed. His—” he paused, glanced at Bee, who said something in Cybertronix that made Hound’s chin go up in surprise.

“It really is,” Raf said. “In English, we say ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’ There isn’t any other way to say it.”

Kim closed her eyes. “An operating system encoded as a magnetic wave confined in a magnetic bottle,” she whispered.

Raf laughed, a shocking sound when things had been so serious just a moment before. He stopped abruptly, eyes going wide, his mouth still open. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.

“Is that how you think of souls?” Hound asked. “Is your soul your operating system?”

“We can’t prove humans _have_ a soul,” Kim said.  “My operating system is my culture. Or—maybe some of my autonomic biological functions.”

He looked Kim up and down. “Mysterious,” he said. “Is your soul your emotions? Or your consciousness?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.” She glanced at Raf. He had climbed into Bee’s lap.

Hound looked at Kim closely. He said, “Cliffjumper’s spark was patterned pulses and ripples in an electromagnetic field. When containment failed, it dispersed into the electromagnetic field of the planet.”

This was pretty much what Optimus had said. Kim nodded her understanding.

The four of them sat for a few minutes. It was already getting warm, and not even eight a.m. Kim opened the bottle of tea in her bag and passed it to Raf first. Bee clicked and whined disapprovingly. Raf didn’t translate, so Hound said, “He says the boy is too young for caffeinated beverages.”

“I drink soda, Bee.”

Hound firmly reset his vocalizer and then “ahem”ed in English. “I am curious about your impression of Reconciliation and Unification.”

“Oh. Well. It looked….really nice,” Kim said, trying to stay neutral and low-key. “Everybody sang songs—humans do that. And then you got out of your armor and danced. Humans,” she had to clear her throat, “do that, too. Um.”

Softly, dully, Raf said, “It looked like you got naked and danced. She’s going to have a rotten time explaining that to humans.”

“Armor isn’t clothing,” Kim protested. “If it was a little, um, _unsettling_ , it was because the best analogy is taking out your internal organs and playing catch with them.” Unsettling was an understatement.

Raf sighed. “ _We_ know that. But, it looked like an orgy.”

Kim recoiled. “How do you even know that word!”

“Orgy,” Hound repeated. Apparently, it was a word he had to look up, because there was a second’s hesitation before he began to laugh. He laughed quite a lot.

Kim buried her face in her hands.

Raf asked, “Were the songs improvised? Or is there a liturgy?”

Hound was still laughing. Bee answered. “Many songs were traditional. Improvisation is permitted. He’ll send the texts to your email, Kim, but some of it doesn’t translate well into English,” Raf translated.

“What is the—is _objective_ the right word? Was it the touching? Was it a physical network you were making?”

“It was a physical network, yes, but not a very complex one. Not like a hard-line interface.” He paused to consult with Bumblebee before continuing, “When the goal of the ritual is the limited network, we say Reconciliation and Connection. Those might be led by first-of-line. Or by anyone, I suppose.”

“What makes it Unification?” Kim asked.

“The Matrix,” Raf said. “The Matrix opened.”

That didn’t sound right. “The Matrix opened? But it didn’t lose containment?”

“No,” Raf said. “It isn’t like that.”

 “When there’s a network like that, the Matrix can-- बЬ αθШ도. Hm. No word for that. Broadcast? Fileshare? What even is a fish hatchery?” Hound made a face. “I think I’ve broken the translation matrix.”

“The thing is,” Raf said heavily, “It’s only a little taste of unity. It isn’t the fullness of connection. It’s just the best they can do until all are one.”

Until all are one. “I’ve heard that reference before, right? It’s a reference to the rift with the Decepticons and the separation from Cybertron. Isn’t it?”

Sadly, Raf shook his head. Hound said, “It’s older than that. Much older.”

Bee added something. Hound nodded. “He thinks it refers to our separation from Primus.”

***

Kim did not see Optimus except in passing for the next four days. 

They were busy days. Most of the time seemed to be spent with round-robin interrogations from Hound, Mirage, Blur and sometimes Springer. They’d all had a chance to see more of Earth, and they all wanted to know _what the slag was going on_ because  (as Mirage put it) ‘this has to be a joke!’

She explained swimming, factory farm pork, camping, nudist colonies, chain fast food, monocropping, amusement parks, themes for amusement parks, the National Forest Service, hydraulic fracking, weddings, used car salesmen, health insurance, Christmas tree farms, cruise ships, and family reunions.

A lot of this was already covered, of course, by the orientation packets they had all gotten. It was just that the explanations were so odd and unlikely that the files simply had to be wrong.

Some of the new mecha who were still acclimating had—a little—time to spend with Kim. The others didn’t. Wheeljack was in space. That had involved a lot of adjustments to his internal systems, and he would stay in orbit until he had visited every compromised communications satellite. Springer spent long patrols in the air over Africa—more than two days at a time—but bridged back in between for recharge. 

Ratchet, Dr. Nomura, and Pierre were intensely assembling a lot of small devices meant to monitor sites where energon had appeared before. Since the trainee lessons were suspended, June took her vacation time (which she had delayed when she transferred into Ratchet’s project).

Carly, Epps, and Lennox were with Ironhide in Tennessee, babysitting a couple of geologists who were trying to isolate what might be special about the composition or shape of the mountains, so they could narrow down the likely environments for the next batch.  Everyone assumed there would be a next batch.

Windblade was with Bee in Australia. Bulkhead was doing short spot checks with Miko. Slipstream, Jetstorm and Drift were  on base, but analyzing satellite readings and electric grid data looking for electromagnetic irregularities. Everyone else was in rotation: they paired up with NEST partners for three-day patrols all over the world.

Kim had a lot of time to sort out notes on the rituals and study the text translations Bee sent over. She needed it. There was a lot of material, and it was alien and dense.

And there were other worries. The involvement of Raf bothered her a lot.  He was a minor. His parents didn’t know.

It was a national security issue.  She had signed a promise not to tell anyone anything.

Optimus had no objection to Bee’s involvement with Raf. Optimus was Kim’s boss. And smarter than she was.

Statistically, Raf was probably safer in Bee’s company than he was alone in the bathroom at home. Slip and fall accidents alone—

Well, that was just rationalizing.

But. What if Raf’s presence helped?  What if something he did, something Bee learned about humans _from him_ , made a difference?  It would be utterly stupid to say, ‘it is too dangerous for you to help, kid, oh, and by the way, if we fail, you’re dead anyway.’ That was insane.

He had gone looking for Bee, not the other way around. It wasn’t Bee’s fault.

He’d looked…really upset the last time Kim had seen him. He didn’t have her training. He didn’t have a finished brain. He did have a good grasp of an alien grammar. And sure, he was younger. His language centers were more pliable. But everyone was so sure Kim couldn’t even manage the basic of Cybertronix, and Raf was fluent.

_***_

Kim was finishing dinner—a wrap and a fruit cup from the DFAC—when Optimus arrived. She quickly tucked the detritus into her bag, flipped open her notebook, and set her phone in the cupholder of the folding chair. He settled on the rocks, graceful for all his mass. “I apologize for cancelling so many of our meetings,” he said.

“I assume you weren’t avoiding me,” she answered seriously. It was possible that that assumption was wrong.

“I was not. When I have not been in meetings or directing ground operations, I was engaged in research.”

“Hmph. Do I want to know the last time you defragged?”

He paused. “I do not know if you want to know.  I completed a cycle twenty minutes ago.”

Kim softened. “That’s good. You found what you were looking for in the research, then?”

“I found a great deal,” he said after a moment.

“Not good news?”

“During the unification, the Matrix interacted…oddly with the Earth’s magnetic field. I reconsidered my analysis of Megatron’s objectives regarding Earth and the production of dark energon.”

Kim wondered what interacting ‘oddly’ meant, and if she would even understand the answer. “So, you want back to look at the files the Wreckers liberated from Cyberton? The ones Megatron was looking at.”

“I did.  Three petabytes of data.”

“That sounds like a lot.” Enough to take him days? “You sort data really fast,” she said tentatively.

He grimaced. “I would have sorted it faster if Mirage had also liberated the index. And if some of it weren’t in code. On the first pass I was collating for references to energon and solar radiation. This time, I collated for references to Earth.”

Kim’s hands began to sweat. “Like…horror fiction? Creepy poetry?”

“Prophesy. Or—no. I do not like connotations of that word. Prognostication. Kim. It is not good news for Earth.”

For a moment, Kim could only stare at him. “How bad?”

“’When the forty-seven spheres align the perpetual conflict will culminate upon a world forged from chaos. The fragile shall perish in the shadow of a rising darkness.’ Then follows a list of intersteller bodies and coordinates. The end-point of the alignment is Earth.”

“Well—maybe it’s already happened?” she said desperately. “It’s pretty weird here, by your standards. And maybe—that’s why Earth is such a cliché of scary fiction?”

Optimus shook his head regretfully. “It has not happened yet. The fell conjunction will not happen for seven hundred years.”

Kim blinked. “Seven hundred years? Seriously? Seven _hundred_ years?” She stood up. “You made it sound like an urgent problem!”

“Kim, you do not understand.  To you this seems to be a very long time—”

“Will any of us still be alive in even ten years? Megatron is still here, right? He still has a giant invisible space ship? I’m really not sure rising darkness seven hundred years from now is an issue _any_ of us have to worry about.”

He regarded her for a long moment. “Not ten years,” he said at last. “Five.”

“Five years…what?”

“Probability calculations project an end to the Decepticon conflict on Earth in less than five years. One way or another.”

“Oh.” Kim sat back down.

“You are correct: this war will not last seven hundred years. Even ten is too optimistic. Megatron has grown progressively more impatient over the millennia.  The acceleration of energon production is a geological anomaly that may attract attention of Earth’s wider population. There are many more Decepticons on Earth, increasing the chances of interaction.” He flashed her an apologetic look. “That the human forces will act rashly is statistically inevitable. In most models open conflict will erupt in four years or less.”

“Wow,” Kim said in a small voice.

“Indeed.”

“So--Really?”

“Eighty-eight point five three percent certainty.”

“Oh.”

“I had not planned to tell you today.”

Kim took a deep breath and dragged herself back to the original topic. “But that leaves us six hundred and ninety-five years to figure out what to do about, um, ‘rising darkness.’ I mean, if it comes to that, even a couple of hundred years is enough to just pack everyone up and leave. With your help.”

He looked at her blankly, and Kim realized she was missing some basic point. “When you say ‘prognostication,’ do you mean, like, the same sort of statistical models you use to project endings to the war?”

“No.”

“What am I not getting?”

He shifted uneasily. “I do not know. It is possible that Megatron has more information about this planet and its potential for rising darkness than I do. If that is the case, my plans are…inadequate.”

“Oh.” Yeah. They might be wrong about what they thought the Decepticons were doing.

“On the other hand, I now have the data to reconstruct the road that would lead him to choose the particular frequencies the Nemesis induced in the Earth’s magnetic field. That suggests we have the same information and the same understanding of it. But in that case, both of us are ignorant, and he is meddling in forces he does not comprehend.”

“His plans could blow up in his face,” Kim said. “And in ours, because we’re talking about the whole planet. Which may have something even more evil than Dark Energon.”

“I fear so.”

“How freaked out are you?”

“It is difficult to gauge the appropriate level of ‘freaked out’ given the situation.”

“What do we do?”

“What we are doing.”

Kim closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m not more help.”

“You have lived on Earth all your life. I don’t suppose you have some idea what the rising darkness might be?”

Kim wrinkled her nose. “Well, offhand, I’d say humans, but I would have thought we’d be capable of interstellar travel in less than seven hundred years.”

His head snapped up. “You are joking.”

“We wouldn’t _mean_ to be evil.  But we’d want to colonize things. And we do a lot of stuff without thinking it through. I can see there might be perspectives that…wouldn’t be looking forward to meeting us out there.”

“Ah. There are perspectives that would apply that description to Cybertronians as well.”

“So.”

“Indeed.”

Kim uncapped her tea and took a long drink. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

His optics reset and settled into a soft, waiting, focus.

“I’m worried about Raf. He seemed…he didn’t take the rituals well, and he wasn’t himself the last time I saw him. And Bee’s gone for more than another week.  I just—”

“We are monitoring Rafael. There is no need for you to be concerned.”

Kim went very still. She could hear the soft woosh of his hydraulics cycling. “Okay. Yeah. But he’s fluent in Cybertronix, and we’ve talked about how maybe human brains couldn’t handle that.”

“We do not need to discuss this.”

Kim stood up. “Perhaps we should discuss this with his parents.” It felt weird to push.  But this wasn’t ethnography.  This wasn’t an informant discussion. Kim set her shoulders. “Something isn’t right.”

“This is not a matter for humans.”

Kim was shocked at the stupidity of that statement. But no. This was a thing Optimus didn’t understand. “He’s a _human child_ ,” she explained, keeping the angry edge out of her voice. “Of course humans—”

“No.”

“Oh, for—” How had this turned into a human rights morass? She had not expected a child endangerment argument with this boss. Fowler promised there would be no ethics issues. And yet-- “Do you not owe anything to new sparks when you put them in a body and they walk away? Is it like that for you? ‘You’re on your own, kid, cope with the world by yourself. And oh, hey, go off with some aliens who hadn’t even seen your species four years ago. That’ll be fine.’ Because it isn’t like this for us.”

Slowly, Optimus pulled back, increasing the distance between them.

“He’s a _child_. Please.”

Optimus shifted his gaze away.

Kim’s disappointment was nearly as powerful has her anger. “Please. You can’t imagine how little experience he has. How fast his brain is growing. He just got the whole story about the war, and he’s learned an alien language, and maybe it’s organized in a way he—"

“You had not mentioned this concern before.”

“He seemed to be _fine_ before. And there was the whole world-ending thing anyway, so it wasn’t…but the last time I saw him he was weirdly subdued and….I’m worried. I think there might be something to worry about.”

“I see.”

 _Aw, hell._ “Optimus,” she whispered when she could speak, “What did you do to Raf?”

“We did not _do_ anything.”

“Oh fuck.”  The thought was too terrifying to even try to imaging what might have happened—or why—or how— “The Decepticons?”

“Not that we have been able to determine. Kim….”

She waited for him to finish. He didn’t. “What?” she pressed.

“We are not certain. At the moment, the situation is officially classified as a miracle.”

Kim blinked. “Um. What?”

He reached down, a hand larger than Kim’s own torso hovering just over a food away from her. “This is the edge of your electromagnetic field. It varies some by activity, by individual, even by ethnicity.  I suspect it is linked to how personal distance is culturally defined and performed, which indicates a rudimentary perception and control.” He pulled hand much further back. “This is the size of Rafael’s field.”

Kim waved an arm in the empty space between them. “That’s as big as a mech’s.”

“In point of fact, it has a radius and strength comparable to mine.”

“What’s causing it?”

“Our scans have been unable to identify a cause.”

“Is that,” Kim shivered, “Is that why he’s been able to learn Cybertronix? Or did it happen because he learned it?” Where was cause and effect here?

“He did not learn Cybertronix.”

Kim shook her head, anger derailed by confusion. “Bee taught him.”

Optimus’ focus narrowed. “He did not.”

“Raf already—?” Kim shook her head again.

“When he approached Bumblebee, yes. He already knew it.”

“So. Someone else taught him….” A worrisome thought. Who? And when?

“As far as we can determine,” Optimus said, “no.”

Fumbling, Kim sat back down in the folding chair and buried her face in her hands. After a moment she tried again. “Somebody had to teach him.”

Optimus slowly shook his head.

“Language doesn’t work like that!”

“You are correct. Rafael is an anomaly.”

“Does…” Kim had to swallow. “Does _he_ know why?”

“Rafael says he does not.  The topic makes him uncomfortable. We agree it is better not to press him.”

“Is he—is he okay?”

“With reference to what scale of comparison?”

“Oh, god.” 

“I fear so. But the question is—is the origin of the miracle your divine? Or mine?”

“ _Miracle_ is not an answer!”

“Four years ago, in March, Raf and his family were camping in the Great Basin National Park. It is a custom called ‘spring break.’ He was less than twenty miles from the point where the Allspark was destroyed.”

Kim felt sick.

“We have, of course, examined his school and medical records.”

Right. Of course. Privacy wasn’t really a thing, even for each other.

“Kim. The anomalies first appeared—”

“Four years ago. He told me.”

_“So how are you doing this?”_

_“I’m sort of a genius.”_

_“You’re a genius at languages?”_

_“Math, mainly. And physics. Not languages. I hate French and I hated Spanish in school.”_

_“Computer programming?”_

_“Really boring. It’s too easy.”_

“Do you think his parents will be able to help him, Kim?”

“No.” His parents would freak out. Rightly, but unhelpfully.

Optimus leaned down, his face sliding beside Kim’s shoulder—close, but not in her face. “I am not able to believe the Allspark has harmed him deliberately. If that is reassuring to you at all.”

“Can we help him? Is there anything we can do?”

“That is Bumblebee’s intention. Whatever the cause, Rafael’s wellbeing is our responsibility.  I will have Jazz take you to see him tomorrow. It is unlikely he understands any better than we do. But. Perhaps he will say to you what he will not say to us.”

“Okay.” It couldn’t hurt to make herself available. But no.  Raf would have told Bee, if he had understood what was happening. Kim was sure of that.

“I am sorry, Kim. I cannot promise…any of this will ‘work out all right.’”

“Yeah. I’m sorry too.” She leaned slightly sideways until she felt the great mass of his helm against her shoulder.

~end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, I started this in 2014. I just wrote the first few chaps and put it away…. And then the last movie was just so unsatisfying. Well. You know how it is. (At least the Bumblebee movie looks much better). 
> 
> Things have gotten a little complicated and I have a work project I need to concentrate on for a few months. But I’m not done, I’m only pausing to breathe. And figure out what comes next, because I’m really not sure. When I started there was a list of things that needed to happen. It went something like:  
> \--Sand!!  
> \--Bee is visiting Raf  
> \--Nemesis arrives.  
> \--More Autobots arrive (who?)  
> \--Kill Cliffjumper.
> 
> That is a short list. I can’t believe it took me so long. Really. This was supposed to be a much shorter story….  
> Oh. About Raf—I waited for years for that particular plot threat to get resolved! Loving somebody does not cause you to know a language. Being really smart or even a genius doesn’t cause you to know a language. Grammar and lexicon can’t be intuited or decoded. 
> 
> So Raf was, from the beginning, a huge and interesting mystery. Was he telepathic with machines? Well, no. He figured out from behavior that Bee was possessed by Megatron, not from reading his mind (which would have made the episode a lot shorter). Had he been the victim of a relic accident like Sam in the movie? That would have been interesting. Was he an avatar of Unicron, a living weapon to destroy the creations of Primus? Disappointingly not. 
> 
> Three seasons I waited for this mystery to go somewhere. But no. It’s just a cute boy and his robot story. Hell, Bee is practically Lassie, chirruping that someone’s in a well….  
> Obviously someone had to take up that open plot problem. I kept waiting for something to come up in AO3.  
> Anywho.
> 
> The idea that humans don’t have provable souls I borrowed from Domesticus. Ahem. It’s fascinating, genius, detailed, concrete, and beautiful in parts--but not for everyone. I have to skip over sections of it myself. 
> 
> The rituals I owe to Martha: I asked what she wanted in a mech funeral. She reminded me that decorating made a party and assumed there would be transforming involved. (Also, I had recently watched the Greatest Showman: contrition and forgiveness—you know the scene.) 
> 
> I think that’s it for now. Thank you all. I’ll see you again when I work out what happens next.


End file.
